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We just got new windows installed in our house. It cost about $10,000 and I paid by credit card. Result: the window company had to pay a $200 fee to Visa for a transaction that probably cost about a dollar (credit risk included) and Wells Fargo rebated about half that back to me in the form of reward points that I will eventually convert into cash. In other words, I was just paid a bonus of $100 to use a credit card instead of paying with cash. Someone please explain a sane economic theory under which this makes sense.

But the windows look nice.

UPDATE: Commenter 98th Story spells things out:

I don’t understand what’s hard to understand here. Visa made out by netting $100 on the transaction. You made out by conveniently using a credit card and scoring $100 in rewards. And the window company made out by scoring a $10,000 dollar job, part of which included handling a $10,000 transaction in a smooth and covenient way. Maybe you wouldn’t have gone with another company just because this one didn’t take a credit card, but I’m positive a percentage of their customers would. Especially if they didn’t quite have $10,000 to spend on windows this month, but wanted to get it done anyway. This is called a win-win-win, and it happens in capitalism all the time.

Check, check, and check. The question is, is this sane? Is it sane to aggressively incentivize people with cash discounts to buy things on credit even if they can’t afford them “this month”? I’d argue that it’s not, even though every individual in this transaction might come out ahead in the short term. If the financial implosion of 2008 didn’t convince us of that, then I guess we deserve whatever follow-on financial collapse we get in the future.

Plus, keep in mind that I’m not opposed to credit card interchange fees. I just want them to be transparent. If everyone really is a winner from the current state of affairs, I very much doubt that Visa and Mastercard would prohibit my window installer from charging me a fee for using a credit card. So why not find out? If he did have that right, and chose not to charge me extra, it would be a strong indication that the fee is worth it to him. But if he had that right and chose to pass it along to me, it would be a strong indication that someone was trying to make a bit of monopoly rent at his expense. Why not let every merchant choose whether or not to pass along interchange fees to their customers and see what happens?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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