Back to the OP, it seems to be highly regional. I recently moved from a very rich city in Washington to a moderately poor one in Oregon. Among other minor culture shocks: nearly everyone took Amex in Redmond; I’d guess about a third of businesses here (and effectively a hundred percent of “mom and pop” businesses) won’t.
I used the Amex as my primary card because I got large amounts of cash back with it (Amex Blue), but I’ve had to switch to a Visa since we moved.
It’s particularly disconcerting on Apple Pay – the charge “goes through” and does the “bing” and “check mark”…then a few seconds later the merchant will say “is that some kind of American Express? We don’t take that.” It’s happened so often I’m probably going to have to switch that card, too.
There might be conspicuous consumption at work. The only thing that allows American Express to get away with their higher fees is the cachet that their clienetel is particularly wealthy; that’s pretty much the only selling point they have to make merchants accept their higher fees. But where does that cachet come from? Partially from the tradition that in the past, you had to pay off your American Express bill in full, meaning that it was a card that was attractive mostly for wealthy clients. That is also supported by the high annual fees that American Express has a reputation for. In that sense, the high membership fees justify the high merchant fees, and vice versa.
Economically, credit cards are a good example for a two-sided market: The same product competes on two different markets (cardholders and merchants) at the same time.
I use Amex wherever it is accepted, and have a Visa card for other times. Over 95% of my credit card usage is Amex, so it is heavily accepted here (Atlanta). Exceptions are:
[ul]
[li]the high school online payment system (lunches, tickets and more)[/li][li]a couple of doctors[/li][li]our gas provider[/li][li]dog kennel[/li][li]parking [/li][/ul]
Sort of- my Amex allows me to pay individual charges over a certain amount ( I think it’s $100) over time. Smaller charges have to be paid off each month.
As a shop owner, I was presented with several options in my contract.
Every option that allowed me to accept American Express had higher charges on everything else.
The options without American Express where cheaper, since hardly anyone uses AmEx here in Ireland I choose the cheaper one.
This may have changed, since I signed the contract in 2007, but every renewal (which is verbal) didn’t include AmEx either.
However, it may have something to do with that if you wanted to accept AMEX that you needed to deal with AMEX directly and their package was higher for accepting Visa.
This cite or this citemight help or explain some things.