Visa and Mastercard used to charge less than 1.5% when every part of the transaction was manual. Now that everything is automated we have fees surpassing 5%.
The only reason that this is possible is because there is very little choice. As a merchant, you either don't accept any cards or you apply the fees on all sales. Some here will say that this is not a monopoly but the industry acts as one.
In order to accept Visa and Mastercard you only deal with one representative which offers almost identical contracts with most cases the only difference is the name of the credit card. They even dictate the terms of every payment method that you may accept. The only reason they can do this is because there are no other options. In effect a monopoly.
With that said this will do little to change the situation since it puts the merchant in conflict with the client where the cause of the problem is the impositions of an oligopoly's terms on all payment methods.
The sad part is that people believe that they are not paying a 5% premium for that 3% reward.