Walmart Canada ratchets up battle with Visa

Starting October 24th, all 16 Walmart locations in Manitoba will stop accepting Visa.

Manitoba’s Walmart stores will soon start rejecting Visa cards.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, stopped accepting Visa at its three Thunder Bay outlets on July 18.

“Customers have adopted alternate forms of payments and there’s been minimal disruption to shopping patterns”, he added. Walmart will continue to accept cash, debit, MasterCard and American Express cards.

Visa, the country’s largest credit card firm, shot back by encouraging Walmart customers “to use their cards at the more than 5,200 stores in Thunder Bay that accept Visa”.

When asked whether Walmart has plans to ban any other credit cards from its stores, he replied that he wasn’t going to speculate on what the company will do in the future.

He said Thunder Bay customers that used to pay by Visa have, for the most part, switched to alternate forms of payment. “Reaction from customers has been better than expected”, said Roberton.

The move follows Ottawa’s announcement on Wednesday it will conduct a further review of the fees charged by credit-card networks and the effects of reduced fees by Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. over the past two years.

Visa said it had offered Walmart one of the lowest rates for any merchant in the country but the retailer wanted more.

“Following an evaluation of credit card transaction fees in Canada and the rest of the world, we have concluded the fees applied to Visa credit card purchases remain unacceptably high”.

Wal-Mart is “unfairly dragging millions of Canadian consumers into the middle of a business disagreement that can and should be resolved between our companies”, Visa said in a June statement about the dispute.

Littler noted that credit cards companies charge merchants fees of 0.28 per cent in France, 0.3 per cent in the United Kingdom and 0.99 per cent in Israel.

The federal government says it is still looking into the issue.