How do customers react to programs like this?

It depends. The first step is to be compliant and offer the program according to best practices. The second is to train your staff on explaining it in laymen’s terms to your customers. We provide not just the Visa-approved signage for each of our cash discount merchants, but cue cards on how staff can explain it to the customer. Even with all this, yes, there will be a few customers who get upset. In our experience, those customers are split – 85% of them continue to come back and pay cash or just accept the fee and 15% of them stop coming. It’s all about the numbers. The number of customers who complain is less than 5% so you’re looking at losing 25% of 5% or under 1% of your customer base. That seems well worth it to offset your entire processing bill.