MPC Hill Blast: Why Do Convenience Stores Care About High Credit Card Swipe Fees?

MPC Hill Blast: Why Do Convenience Stores Care About High Credit Card Swipe Fees?

Credit card swipe fees are out of control.

Total payment card swipe fees were $198 billion last year.

The fees have increased by 80% since 2020.

For all Main Street retailers, the fees are their second-highest operating cost on average.

Is there a reason that convenience stores in particular care? Yes — annual data that has just been compiled for the year 2025 demonstrates this vividly:

On average, convenience stores lost 7 cents on every in-store transaction in 2025.
- Stores were literally selling at a loss due to high operating costs and the competitive retail environment!
On average, convenience stores paid 17 cents in swipe fees on in-store credit card transactions in 2025.
Without swipe fees, convenience stores would have made a healthy profit on every in-store sale.
In the real world with huge swipe fees — convenience stores lost money inside their stores for the year.

The only reason convenience stores were able to make any profit on average last year was because of motor fuel sales. Now, swipe fees on fuel sales are increasing at dramatic rates with $57 million to $58 million collected per day in swipe fees on fuel alone over the past week.

And convenience stores collect huge taxes for the government (including sales taxes, fuel taxes, alcohol taxes, tobacco taxes and more).

In all, convenience stores collected and remitted $235 billion in taxes on their transactions in 2025. (That doesn’t cover the income taxes, property taxes and others they pay as a business.)
For the privilege of being a tax collector, convenience stores paid $4.8 billion in swipe fees just on the taxes they collected.
- That means the big banks made convenience stores go into their own pockets to make up the shortfall to the state, local and federal governments.

COMPETITION IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE

IT'S TIME TO PASS THE CREDIT CARD COMPETITION ACT