Circle [image-nocss] K said that it expects to get about 200 to 300 signatures per store and to deliver nearly three-quarters of a million signatures to Congress after the petition drive, which began around July 4, concludes on Labor Day.
Lynda Gromek, Circle K's region operations director for the Southwest and Linda Adams, an Oklahoma City-area Circle K store manager shared their stories and talked about their participation in the petition drive.
"For Circle K, [interchange fees] are our second-largest cost behind payroll," said Gromek. "Not accepting a credit card is not an option, because the credit-card consumer just goes somewhere else. So it puts us in a position of losing business, as well."
Adams described how the everyday customer has been reacting to the petition: "Our customers are very favorable to signing this petition because they understand that there are things going on with the credit-card companies that they don't know about. They understand there is something going on, and they want to help."
They were joined on the conference call by Lyle Beckwith of the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and Doug Kantor of the Merchants Payments Coalition (MPC), a group of small business owners and retailers across the country who have launched a grassroots campaign to ask Congress to reform the abusive swipe fee system.
"This a problem across retail," said Beckwith. "Small retailers, independent operators, large companies alike; restaurants, florists, bowling alleysanybody that accepts plastic.... [Customers] are completely unaware of the costs associated with using it." And that is intentional on the part of the credit-card companies, he said.
"The merchant adds the fee in as best he can into the cost of all the goods," he added. "We estimate that the cost of goods have been elevated by 2%. That's gasoline, that's everything you buy at retail." Even people paying with cash are still paying the cost of these fees indirectly through the higher cost of goods.
"What we're trying to accomplish nationwide with retailers working together, is to encourage Congress to enact legislation that will interject transparency and competition into this market so the fees can go down," said Beckwith.
Oklahoma is very important in the fight, he added, because Senator Tom Coburn (R) sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee; Representative Frank Lucas (R) sits on the House Financial Services Committee. Both have legislation before them that would deal with fee situation, Beckwith said. "Both are in an excellent position to help out the consumers and the retailers."
Kantor added that there are three pieces of legislation pending in Congress now. In the House, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyer (D-Mich.) and Rep. Bill Schuster (R-Pa.) have a bill that would allow merchants to negotiate collectively with the credit-card industry, which sets fees collectively. There is a Senate bill that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has that does the same thing.
The other bill is by Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Schuster. It "takes a different approach and gets rid of some of the constraints that the credit-card industry has put on the system that keep these fees hidden from consumers and to some extent from businesses...and allows there to be a competitive market for the fees fore the first time," said Kantor.
Circle K and 7-Eleven are the most prominent convenience retailers putting petitions in their stores for customers to sign to convey to Congress their displeasure over the costs associated with high credit-card fees, which result in higher prices on retail goods.
Margaret Chabris, spokesperson for Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc., told CSP Daily News that its campaign ended August 10. "Petition books are being collected. Signatures to be counted at market level, then by division and then shipped to Dallas," she said. It will know the total number of signatures gathered in early September.
Circle K's petition, entitled "Fight Unfair Credit Card Fees," begins: "The credit-card interchange fee is the biggest credit-card fee you've never heard of. Nearly $2 of every $100 American consumers spend using credit cards goes directly to the credit-card industry through the interchange fee. In 2008 alone, Americans paid over $48 billion in interchange fees, more than twice what was paid in credit card late fees and three times ATM fees. The average American household paid $427 in credit-card interchange fees last year. Total interchange fee revenues have tripled since 2001."
Click here for additional CSP Daily News coverage of Circle K's petition and to read the full text. Andclick here for coverage of 7-Eleven's petition.
Also, click on the links below for "dueling" YouTube videos from both sides of the issue of credit-card fees in c-stores.
7-Eleven retailer (dennehypr) from Quincy, Mass.
"Don't Make Us Pay"/Electronic Payments Coalition.
Laval, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc., Circle K's parent company, has a network of 5,443 c-stores in 11 large geographic markets, including eight in the United States covering 34 states and three in Canada covering 10 provinces. There are more than 2,100 Circle K stores across the United States.
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