What is being billed as the largest antitrust settlement ever at $7.25 Billion, The Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation settlement received preliminary court approval back in November 2012. All merchants in the class action suit were notified that they had until May 28th to opt out. With this deadline behind us and only about 7,000 merchants out of more than 7 million merchant class members formally opting out, final court approval is exceedingly likely.
Many of the merchants that did opt out were very large merchants like Amazon.com, 7-Eleven, CVS Pharmacy Inc., Target Corp., Macy’s Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who opted out over concerns that the settlement gave Visa and MasterCard too much freedom to raise rates in the future. In choosing to … more