“Merchants Back Bill to Cut Sway of 2 Big Cards” (Business & Finance, Sept. 15) exposes Walmart, Target and other megaretailers’ multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to support Senate legislation to regulate credit-card use. Readers shouldn’t be fooled. This bill is being pushed by big-box retailers so that they can pocket billions of dollars without passing a dime to consumers. We’ve seen this before. A Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond study shows that 98% of retailers failed to reduce prices or raised them when Sen. Dick Durbin intervened in the debit-card markets in 2010. Meanwhile, at least a million consumers lost access to banking.
