1 year of business swipes; V/MC/AX/DISC data:

[Anonymous]

Very interesting!  Great post. 

Plus I use my Discover debit card for puchases $2 and under.  They give me $0.10 per swipe so I'll take the 5-10% cashback.

[Dalmus]

My NFCU and Landmark debit cards are both Visa, but my local savings bank issues MC debit cards.

My two CC daily drivers are my NFCU Visa (3% for restarants) and DiscoverIT (5% gas and effectviely 2% everyting else).  Once my Discover promo period ends, Barclay will get my grocery shopping again and gas when its not a category of Discover.

My question is... does the average consumer (not hyperactive MyFico members care whether they have a Visa or MC?  Or do they just take whatever the issuer sends without thinking about it?  In other words, is this just better marketing to banks and payment processors by Visa?

[K-in-Boston]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Anyway, the restaurant does a little over $4M in annual sales and in 2016 we had a total of 84,334 credit card transactions, of which their breakdown was the following:

Visa:  63,583 swipes, 75.4% of total transactions.

MC:  15,085 swipes, 17.9% of total transactions.

Amex:  3461 swipes, 4.1% of total transactions.

Disc:  2205 swipes, 2.6% of total transactions.

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Small chain of fast casual units in suburban Boston here.  Each store is right at $2M, so if I combine two:

92,808 transactions total ($3,248,124 in card sales)

Visa Credit: 45,240 swipes, 48.75%, Avg. $37.93

Visa Debit: 12,648 swipes, 13.63%, Avg. $16.77

Total Visa: 57,888 swipes, 62.37%, Avg $33.31

MC Credit: 12,264 swipes, 13.21%, Avg. $42.77

MC Debit: 11,208 swipes, 12.08%, Avg. $25.27

MC Total: 23,472 swipes, 25.29%, Avg. $34.41

Discover: 696 swipes, 0.75%, Avg. $29.10

AmEx: 10,752 swipes, 11.59%, Avg. $45.74

Those percentages are the swipes (debit cards are charged as credit, but due to Durbin are much cheaper for many merchants).  If you were to actually look at percentage of total card sales, the debit cards are a much smaller segment and AmEx proves its worth for slightly higher swipe fees (although our negotiated AmEx rates are in-line with most of the Business, Purchasing and High-End Rewards V/MC swipes).   I am sure you would find similar results.  As a total of card sales: Visa Credit (52.84%), Visa Debit (6.53%), Visa Total (59.37%), MC Credit (16.15%), MC Debit (8.72%), MC Total (24.87%), Discover (0.62%), AmEx (15.14%).

I don't want to dig up the exact numbers right now, but we have a large catering unit also, and their AmEx card sales are about 30% of cards keyed and about 45% of card revenue!  Well-to-do New Englanders love their AmEx cards.

[galahad15]

Very fascinating thread, thanks to BBS for sharing the intriguing info! 

IME, with the exceptions of my FNBO Amex, FNBO BucksBack VS, Discover IT, and US Bank Cash+ VISA, close to virtually 100% all of my credit card purchases are made using my MC ccs.  Although that may be changing a little in the near-future with VISA getting some extra purchasing activity than before, with the most recent upgrades and additions to Unify FCU VISA cards I have.  I don't currently use debit cards at all, since they are too risky in mho if someone were to get hold of them and attempt to use them fraudulently, whereas with ccs, there is 0% fraud liability (or at most $50).

[Revelate]

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@Dalmus wrote:

My NFCU and Landmark debit cards are both Visa, but my local savings bank issues MC debit cards.

My two CC daily drivers are my NFCU Visa (3% for restarants) and DiscoverIT (5% gas and effectviely 2% everyting else).  Once my Discover promo period ends, Barclay will get my grocery shopping again and gas when its not a category of Discover.

My question is... does the average consumer (not hyperactive MyFico members care whether they have a Visa or MC?  Or do they just take whatever the issuer sends without thinking about it?  In other words, is this just better marketing to banks and payment processors by Visa?

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My guess is it's irrelevant to the average consumer, absurdly less important than the bank or particular credit card product.  People who are looking for Visa Siggy/Infinite or WEMC or similar benefits are another niche group that would care presumably.

Only time I think they would care is if the card is declined because Visa's network had an outage or something .

[grillandwinemaster]

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@K-in-Boston wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Anyway, the restaurant does a little over $4M in annual sales and in 2016 we had a total of 84,334 credit card transactions, of which their breakdown was the following:

Visa:  63,583 swipes, 75.4% of total transactions.

MC:  15,085 swipes, 17.9% of total transactions.

Amex:  3461 swipes, 4.1% of total transactions.

Disc:  2205 swipes, 2.6% of total transactions.

---

Small chain of fast casual units in suburban Boston here.  Each store is right at $2M, so if I combine two:

92,808 transactions total ($3,248,124 in card sales)

Visa Credit: 45,240 swipes, 48.75%, Avg. $37.93

Visa Debit: 12,648 swipes, 13.63%, Avg. $16.77

Total Visa: 57,888 swipes, 62.37%, Avg $33.31

MC Credit: 12,264 swipes, 13.21%, Avg. $42.77

MC Debit: 11,208 swipes, 12.08%, Avg. $25.27

MC Total: 23,472 swipes, 25.29%, Avg. $34.41

Discover: 696 swipes, 0.75%, Avg. $29.10

AmEx: 10,752 swipes, 11.59%, Avg. $45.74

Those percentages are the swipes (debit cards are charged as credit, but due to Durbin are much cheaper for many merchants).  If you were to actually look at percentage of total card sales, the debit cards are a much smaller segment and AmEx proves its worth for slightly higher swipe fees (although our negotiated AmEx rates are in-line with most of the Business, Purchasing and High-End Rewards V/MC swipes).   I am sure you would find similar results.  As a total of card sales: Visa Credit (52.84%), Visa Debit (6.53%), Visa Total (59.37%), MC Credit (16.15%), MC Debit (8.72%), MC Total (24.87%), Discover (0.62%), AmEx (15.14%).

I don't want to dig up the exact numbers right now, but we have a large catering unit also, and their AmEx card sales are about 30% of cards keyed and about 45% of card revenue!  Well-to-do New Englanders love their AmEx cards.

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It's interesting to see that neither upstate New Yorkers, well to do Bostonians favor there Discover cards! I love my Discover card here in the laid back, sunny West Coast!

[grillandwinemaster]

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@redpat wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:
It's also interesting as a customer I find that I want to use different cards at different types of establishments and not just for bonus categories.

For example for some reason I want to use Amex at Dillards, but at In N Out burger I'm fine handing over Discover.

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So what you are telling us is that you don't want Amex to know that you are a closet In-N-Out burger eater........It's okay I use Amex at Micky D's and Capital Grille......At Nordstrom it's EDP or FU I'll take the extra 1/2 point.

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So what your saying is that it would be a faux pas to use my Credit 1 at Nordstrom's?? Even if it's the Nascar edition? 

J/k- I don't own a credit 1- "not that there's anything wrong with that!" 

Lol

[Anonymous]

Glad so many have found this thread insightful and great discussion thus far.  To answer a couple of questions and add some more data points that I thought might be useful:

All debit card transactions are included in the credit card figures I gave.  I agree that this does skew the numbers a bit, but I have no way of breaking out debit card transactions relative to credit card transactions.  I would think debit cards (mostly Visa's) probably account for 25% or so of the Visa transactions.  That is a number completely shot from the hip and could obviously be higher or lower, but just based on my in-business observations.

Total net sales that those transactions were based on were $4,168,163. 

While I gave swipes in the original post, let me now give total dollars:

Visa:  $2,415,345

MC:  $619,430

Amex:  $171,700

Disc:  $88,344

Total card transactions therefore equated to $3,294,819 of the $4,168,163 in net sales, or 79.0% of transactions were made on cards.

If you divide total sales by total swipes, the average transaction was $39.07 per swipe in 2016.

When you factor in store gift cards (cards sold for the restaurant only) as a payment method it brings cash transactions down into the teens percentage wise.

My personal CC spend is not indicative of these numbers; I use Discover and Amex for almost everything, at least 90% of my swipes of probably around $3k/mo go to these two types with my Visa and MC seeing very little use.  I have not used a debit card personally in years, and I only use cash maybe once a year when I'm at the County Fair or some place that simply doesn't take cards which is extremely rare.

[Anonymous]

I think the reason why most of them are visa is because in upstate NY, at least from what I've seen, people tend to be poorer and not have good jobs, and lousier credit therefore not enabling them to qualify for premium charge cards like amex etc.

Also, is your profit high on that 4M or not. Restaurants are by far the hardest business out there to make money with. Had many friends lose EVERYTHING over the years due to not doing well with franchised and non-franchises restaurants.

[rlx01]

It's interesting to see MC credit average check is a fair bit higher than V, and gets pretty close to Amex.

I guess those are mostly Citibank MCs?