A cheaper alternative to cards here is app payment via Swish (approximately like Venmo). Goes straight to the vendor's bank account at a flat rate of the equivalent of USD ~$0.15 per transaction.

Why don’t you pay the transaction fee every time you use your card or whatever then? Why should the merchant foot the bill?

That used to be semi-common for smaller transactions in Sweden but was made illegal. Not sure why, probably to fight tax avoidance.

At this point the cost of handling cash is way higher than handling cards and as no one in Sweden ever uses cash its no longer relevant at all anyway. Now many (maybe even most?) dont accept cash to avoid the cost of handling cash instead.

Having a cash register and handling cash costs money too, doesn't it? It's just a cost of doing business.

No, it really doesn't, besides the fixed investment of buying a cash register. The idea of being forced to hand over a percentage of all my earnings to private company is abominable. I pay taxes to the elected government, not to some bank. It's why I only accept checks, ACH transfers or cash as payment, and it saves me 3% of my income a year over taking credit cards.

In the EU fees are capped at around 0.3 % I believe.

And you're mistaken if you think cash is cheaper for most stores. You risk theft (so need to pay for measures against that), you have straight losses from mistakes, have to spend time handling and counting cash, spend time depositing, spend time buying change, etc etc

I’m pretty sure there are fees involved with running a cash register, aren’t there? At least in Sweden, the machine has to be certified, registers with the tax authority and then inspected for re-certification regularly.

Regarding cash, does your bank not charge a fee for depositing cash?

No one has to pay a transaction fee to accept cash.

And you didn’t answer why you shouldn’t pay that fee.

What do you think happens to the cash at the end of the day?

Managing cash has costs too, they're just harder to quantify: you have to ferry it to a bank, you have increased risk of theft, fraud, and robberies, you need extra time to actually check the register etc.

And then you risk losing business if you don't offer card payments because it's just more convenient for most customers (you may like wise lose some if you don't take cash, but that's a vanishing market).

One big difference is that there's competition between cash handling providers, while there's essentially zero wiggle room for interchange fees.

That's what makes interchange and network fees so much more problematic than acquiring fees. There's very healthy competition between credit card acquirers and payment service providers on both features and price, but in the end, you have to accept whatever card your customer has or there won't be a transaction.

In the EU the authorities have recognized the power of the card networks and introduced price controls on interchange fees in 2015, capping them at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards.

Note that Europe passed a law that limits interchange fees to something very low by US standards, like $0.20 or 0.05%, so it's not a reasonable excuse.

(The fact that credit card networks continue doing business in Europe proves they're still profitable and the US is getting ripped off by these fees)