National Payment Card
With the prices of gas skyrocketing this summer, there are new plans being formulated to help alleviate some of the enormous price jump. One such plan comes in the form of a National Payment Card. Every time people use their credit cards to fill up their gas tanks, the credit card companies take a percentage of the transaction from the gas station. When gas prices start to rise, so do the amount of purchases made with credit cards, mainly because people don’t have the available cash in their pockets to pay the higher bill. To make matters worse, the credit card companies have increased their transaction fee by 22% lately. This spike in the transaction fee causes the gas stations to up their prices as well. A normal transaction today would generally cost in the range of 65 to 85 cents per customer coming out of the gas station’s revenue. Since this is costing the gas stations more, it is costing us more.
In order to help drive gas prices down a little bit, a new organization has formed called the National Payment Card. The National Payment Card organization can take just about any card with a bar code strip and turn it into a debit card for your gas. This means that you could potentially use your license, Blockbuster card, grocery store rewards card, or almost anything else to pay for gas. The reason that this would help reduce gas prices is because the NPC operates through the Automated Clearing House Network, which is significantly cheaper than those used by Mastercard and Visa. In fact, this network would only require gas stations to pay a flat 15 cent rate on all purchases. This is a decrease of 50 to 70 cents. The only problem with the NPC plan is that it requires each gas station to begin to use the system individually. Whether this catches on quickly or at all has yet to be seen. In order for the plan to go forward, it seems that a major chain of gas stations would have to switch its system. This doesn’t seem all that likely to me since the cost of switching to this system would probably cost the chain more than if they were to stay with the current system.
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