Published
5 years ago on
March 04, 2019
The retail giant, Kroger is an Ohio based retailing firm which was founded in 1883 and for years now, they have been accepting Visa credit cards at its chain of Smith’s food and drug stores. When this news broke, Anthony Pompliano tweeted an offer to hook them up with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network across all their stores.
This all came at the end of last week when Kroger announced the move to no longer accept Visa credit cards claiming that the fees were too much. Smith’s chain totals to over 20,000 employees at 134 food and drug stores across seven states in the US.
The CFO at Kroger, Mike Schlotman explained that the card fees charged by Visa are a lot higher at Smith’s than any other credit card brand saying, “Visa has been misusing its position and charging retailers excessive fees for a long time.”
Visa is actually behind the increased fees for the banks processing card payments on behalf of merchants in April.
Under the circumstances, it only seemed natural for someone to eventually crop up and suggest an alternative through cryptocurrency. Pompliano was that someone.
Grocery store @kroger is stopping acceptance of @Visa in over 250 stores because of network fees.
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) March 2, 2019
Who knows someone on the leadership team there?
The Morgan Creek Digital team will fly to meet them and get them hooked up with the Lightning Network nationwide. 🔥🙏🏽
One of the product managers at Kroger Digital responded to the tweet saying, “Hey Pomp - I'm a Product Manager at Kroger Digital. Can confirm that Yael is the correct person to discuss this with. I would love to set up a conversation.” Pomp was quick to respond saying “DM me. Let’s do it”.
The Ripple army got involved and questioned the preparedness of the Lightning Network and suggested that XRP is a much better alternative. More interestingly though is that someone suggested that selling a Smith’s gift card on BitRefill, which would almost definitely make a zero effort stop-gap solution.
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