  That’s the smart question at the center of The New York
Times’s latest entry in its solid Card Game series with PBS’s
Frontline. It looks at how Visa’s domination of the debit-card
arena led MasterCard to raise its fees to try to compete.
With this series, the Times hasn’t had to hit the plastic
business hard, it’s just had to pick up the rock a bit and let
us all see what’s slithering underneath it.  This is the
plumbing of the consumer system—something like a utility—and the
industry has wedged itself in a unique position that let’s it
take money from consumers without them ever really knowing it.
The fees don’t hit them directly, of course. But they are built
into the cost structure of retail and they get passed along to
consumers through higher prices or decreased service. In this
“Card Game,” Visa and Mastercard are the house.  The Times does
a good job in this piece of explaining the history of how the
PIN bizarro market came to be. Little did you know that you’d
actually be interested in a piece