While you may not know it; merchants have to pay a fee to use the credit card machines which typically is 2% of the actual purchase price. To defray this cost of doing business many retailers factor the 2% fee into the shelf price for items which leaves cash-paying customers shelling out the same 2% overhead on their purchases too. During this year your family will spend on average $427 to cover these fees while the credit card companies net a cool $48 million from the interchange fees.

You can't make that kind of money in the U.S. without attracting attention from Congress and lobbying groups especially when your industry is already under fire for high interest rates and complicated anti-consumer fees and fine print. Congress is looking to regulate the interchange fee with the Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2008. This fee is a cost of doing business; get rid of it and you risk a less reliable system or having the cost will moved to a different area under a new name. Even if the retailers can negotiate a lower fee, how likely is it that they will drop prices to reflect it? Consumers are already adjusted to the current price so the profit will stay with the retailer, not be passed to the consumer.

A story yesterday about a new business arrangement between Deutsche Post's DHL and United Parcel Service reminded me why I love owning my own business. I can make my own decisions and do things that others might not like to do... like collaborate with competitors.

Basically, DHL has been trying to compete with UPS, offering to deliver your packages anywhere in the world. The problem is that DHL doesn't have as big a network as UPS, so it was very expensive to get packages to certain places.

The solution: Work out a deal to have UPS transport certain DHL packages. It's a win-win in my eyes. UPS increases annual revenue by an estimated $1 billion. And DHL keeps its promise to customers at a much lower cost than if it tried to transport all packages themselves.

Wal-Mart has been running television advertisements lately trumpeting the assertion that they save the average American family something like $2,200 per year. At first I just let the promotion blow right over my head but on a recent trip to our closest Wal-Mart (about 40 miles away) I took a few moments to think about their promotion because my wife and I found ourselves saying "we can get that cheaper at home."

First off, those Wal-Mart dudes have a lot of gall assuming that they know exactly what price every other retailer on the planet is charging for the same items they have stocked in their Wal-Mart stores. Secondly, it's more than a bit arrogant for Wal-Mart to assume that every item purchased in their stores is a must have item which a person will immediately find another retail source for if Wal-Mart doesn't sell it to them. That would be the only way they could have a valid claim about how much money their pricing saves for anyone.

I live in a region with a population small enough that once Wal-Mart stores become entrenched in an area, their level of retail competition drops to nearly zero and in light of that I have noticed a particularly interesting dynamic. It seems that where Wal-Mart has a captive audience such as is the case here in the northern most regions of Wisconsin, once the competition dies out, Wal-Mart's prices become conspicuously similar to or even higher than the prices of the retailers they drove under. I don't care what anybody says: that's a mode of operation similar to the way Al Capone and his boys did business in Chicago.

The deal goes like this: You come in low priced, undercut the competition until they starve out and then set your price points wherever you'd like to because you've become the only game in town.

Sam Walton must be rolling in his grave.