Pain on Main Street: A First-Ever Drop in Card-Based Same-Store Sales

(July 30, 2009) As the recession continues to batter merchants of all sizes, small and medium-size retailers are getting hit especially hard, and as a result so are the acquirers that process their card transactions. Indeed, in a development apparently never seen before, same-store sales on Visa and MasterCard for these Main Street merchants were down fully 4.9% in the January through May period, according to research released this week by First Annapolis Consulting. By contrast, same-store sales for these same merchants had climbed modestly, by 1.5%, last year.

To get a picture of the current state of merchant acquiring, First Annapolis surveyed 17 acquirers—nine bank acquirers and eight non-bank processors--that account for more than half of all U.S. card-based payments. Besides the overall decline it discovered, the firm said 17 acquirers reported same-store sales plummeting by more than 10%. Overall, bank acquirers reported a steeper drop in sale-store sales than did the non-banks.

“To put this into perspective, card-based payments have never registered same-store growth declines overall, even in past recessions,” the Linthicum, Md.-based consulting and research firm said in a statement announcing its results...

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