
34 little POS machines - ZeljkoS
http://svedic.org/philosophy/34-little-pos-machines
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jessaustin
It would have been more interesting to examine why other locations _don 't_
see such a proliferation of card readers or ATMs. That might not have made
such a fiery match for the burning of "extreme libertarian" strawmen (because
libertarian paradise Croatia), but it would have been plausibly constructive
rather than simply polarizing.

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barney54
The real questions here are why is this so rare in other places and why did it
happen in Croatia? I wish the article had asked those questions.

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mariozivic
The example with ATMs happens in a lot of places I've been but I'll just list
Japan as the most extreme example.

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bogomipz
Wow there's a great irony in that you used the NYC Subway system as an
example. When there were three different independent companies they competed
hard for customer's business, provide punctual service and fare increases were
generally flat or at least in line with inflation. Now that the Subway is
owned by the city it is a monopoly with large fare increases every two years,
increasingly piss poor service, permanent budget problems, shadowy book
keeping, and the victim of all kinds of politics and cronyism that were
completely unknown when the system existed as private run entities. The NYC
Subway is an example of an absurdity that is equivalent to the 42 different
POS devices in that picture not a contrast to it.

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specialist
Which mass transit systems outperform NYC's?

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bluesign
Many POS machines lately have a bank selection screen at the start. although
banks are pretty interconnected, they have ridiculous fee differences between
their cards and other banks'.

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saosebastiao
What a terrible article, full of pseudoscience and pseudohistory.

Businesses charging for access to their networks has absolutely nothing to do
with the endowment effect. There isn't some sort of "my network is better than
yours" ego trip going on just because someone charges you to use their
network. Their networks are products; they have infrastructure, maintenance,
marketing, advertising. You don't give away your products for free, why should
they? And if the expectation was that they should give away their network for
free, who would ever care to build the network? Why incur those costs if you
can just rely on someone else to build it for you?

Capitalist businesses have totally overcome this problem (despite any possible
"my network is better than yours" biases) in many markets, most notable
internet infrastructure. You can physically see it in action at Internet
Exchange Points, where networks of different sizes and values meet together to
exchange access to each other's networks.

My bank lets me use any ATM anywhere in the world without an ATM fee. They do
this by refunding any ATM fees that other banks may charge. Why would they do
this? Because then they don't have to build and maintain a network of ATMs,
and they have happier customers because of it.

The subway example ignores vast swathes of actual history, starting with the
very fact that the IND lines didn't exist for 30 years until after the turn of
the century. And yes, their networks' tunnels were incompatible between lines,
but then again, so are the networks of every other subway of the era, even the
ones built by governments. And their demise and eventual merger had nothing to
do with market friction, but rather something far less capitalist: government
imposed price ceilings. Both companies experienced cost inflation, just like
every other company in the US during those years, but neither was allowed to
charge more than their Nickel Fare. The companies did what every other company
does when they see their margins erode due to price caps: they stopped
investing, stopped maintaining, and stopped caring about what their customers
thought about it. They couldn't compete with each other on the value of their
service, so they accepted their market share and declined together. Once
people got fed up with crappy providers for subway service, they decided to go
the public option with their own government funded line to bring some
competition...which is how the IND line actually came into existence.
Unsurprisingly, they also couldn't compete on a Nickel Fare, and all of the
companies were forced into merger less than a decade later.

Unfortunately, in this quest to malign capitalism for the merger of three
independent subway lines, the author forgets to mention the biggest benefit of
that approach: Nobody paid a cent in taxes to build the second largest subway
system in the world at the time.

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Pitarou
The account of what's going on with the POS machines doesn't make economic
sense. If it was true, it would be easy for one bank to capture most of the
market simply by charging more reasonable POS fees. I think it's much more
likely that it's the cardholder's bank that's overcharging, not the POS's.

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qihqi
I wish things like square and paypal solves this problem.

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lwhalen
Speaking from direct experience, both Square and PayPal are _terrible_ for
accepting cards. I have a consulting client who wants to pay me with the
company AmEx, I have yet to do a transaction that doesn't get flagged or held
or otherwise interfered with. Horrible companies, with slow, uncaring,
unresponsive customer service.

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fuck_dang
Must be nice to check out 34 customers at a time though, right?

I kid.

Fragmentation is a huge issue in the retail industry. I've heard of companies
that have different payroll staffers for different states, some that have
different phones for different states because of fees, etc etc.

It also seems like there might be potential for a POS device that could
'spoof' other devices, to avoid fees and such. Surely it's just sending out
certain headers to identify itself, right?

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mschuster91
> It also seems like there might be potential for a POS device that could
> 'spoof' other devices, to avoid fees and such. Surely it's just sending out
> certain headers to identify itself, right?

Nope. PoS CC/DC terminals have quite sophisticated HSMs these days. Each
device has a unique set of key pairs.

