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Noah Defilippis is the owner of Pinecone and Chickadee, a small business in Portland.
Every week at Pinecone and Chickadee, I do the same math a lot of small business owners do. What came in, what went out, what is left over. Swipe fees are part of that math. But so is fraud, and so is trust, and I think a bill called the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) trades one problem for a much bigger one.
My wife and I own the shop in Portland. We are a little quirky, a little cozy, and very much part of this community. So when I read a recent letter to the editor about swipe fees and the Credit Card Competition Act, I understood why it was written. I just do not agree with where it lands.
The frustration for small business owners is real. Credit card fees eat into thin margins, and thousands of dollars a year is nothing to shrug off. I feel that same pinch every month at Pinecone and Chickadee. If someone told me a bill in Congress could hand small businesses like ours real relief, of course I would want to believe it.
That is exactly why I think this bill is so appealing on the surface. But I have looked closely at what this legislation actually does, and I do not think it delivers what it promises.
Look at who is actually raising the alarm about this bill. It is not just big banks trying to protect their profits, which is the story you usually hear. It is small business owners, credit unions, tourism-focused business owners, payment security experts. That is a wide range of people worried about the same thing, and I think that should tell us something.
Here is what worries me most. Several independent analyses have found that this bill could weaken payment security. It would push transactions through alternative networks that do not offer the same fraud protections banks use today. I think about fraud every single day I run this shop. A big box store can absorb a bad month of chargebacks and move on. I cannot. A string of fraudulent transactions could genuinely hurt us.
We have already run this experiment once. Years ago, similar rules were applied to debit cards. The savings were supposed to trickle down to small merchants like me. They did not. Large national retailers captured most of the benefit. Local shops saw almost nothing change on our bottom line. And fraud went up. I have no reason to believe this bill would play out any differently.
The letter also argued that this legislation would put money back in the pockets of small businesses and their communities. I understand the hope behind that. But I would ask anyone drawn to this bill to look past the pitch and at the fine print. Talk to the people running shops on Munjoy Hill, in Brunswick, in Bangor. Ask them if this is the fix they are asking Congress for. I have not met one who is.
Pinecone and Chickadee exists because people want something different than chain stores. They want a shop where the owner knows their name, where the gifts feel personal, where buying local still means something. But wanting something different does not make us immune to tight margins or a shaky economy.
We depend on payment systems that are secure and reliable. We depend on our customers feeling confident enough to spend money in our store instead of saving it or shopping somewhere else entirely. This bill puts both of those things at risk, at a moment when I believe small businesses can least afford it.
I believe Maine’s small businesses are not asking for a new payment system built around untested networks with weaker fraud protection. We are asking to keep the systems we already trust, so we can keep doing what we do best. Serving our neighbors and hoping our neighbors keep coming back.
Small businesses like mine are counting on Congress to get this one right. But the Credit Card Competition Act isn’t the answer.