ANDERSON, Ind. – “Why should the banks help themselves to so much of my customers’ money?” That’s the question that Jay Ricker, chairman of Ricker Oil Co. Inc., attempts to answer in an opinion piece that ran last week in the Indianapolis Business Journal. The following is an excerpt of that article.

“I own a chain of convenience stores in the area. When you swipe a credit card to pay for gas or snacks, the bank that issued your card gouges my customers and me with huge fees for processing the transaction.

Visa and MasterCard so dominate this business that they can price-fix these ‘swipe fees’ at exorbitant levels. Their profit margins can run up to 10,000%; I’m lucky to make 1 or 2%.

It’s the antithesis of the free-market system that built the largest economy in the world, an anomaly that harkens back to the bad old days of the robber barons.

Most people don’t know much if anything about swipe fees, and that’s the way the big banks like it. If nobody knows, they can continue to plunder consumers and merchants alike with impunity.

Six years ago, Congress decided it had had enough and made banks start competing for this business, but for debit cards only.

Reform saved our customers lots of money, even though the banks keep trying to get around the law. The Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve had to scold Visa recently for deceptively channeling customers into its network.

And now the big banks want to repeal reform, even though the reforms are so modest that the banks are still marking up their swipe fees a cool 500%, according to Federal Reserve numbers.

That money should be left in consumers’ pockets.

I can attest from experience that reform helped my customers. And a noted economist showed it helped the rest of the country, saving consumers nearly $6 billion and supporting 37,000 jobs in its first year alone.

In Indiana, it supported 700 jobs that first year.

There is no good reason for the banks to exploit my customers and my business.

There is no good reason why Americans pay the highest swipe fees in the world.

There is no good reason to repeal debit reform. It has helped people across Indiana save money. That money should not be ripped from their pockets by the nation’s biggest banks.

And there is no good reason why we shouldn’t now move to reform credit cards, too, and finally make the entire card market fair and competitive, like the rest of our free-market system.”