I was at a department store today and tried to pay my charge account with my debit card. The cashier said payments were only accepted in cash or check! Does anyone allow debit cards to be used as payments on store credit cards

Would not accept a debit card? That's just weird.

They accepted debit cards for purchases but not payments. Is this typical?

hmmm, I have never tried that but I guess it does make sense that they wouldn't accept credit cards to pay off a credit card (ATM Visa) unless you did a balance transfer.

Even though an atm is the same as cash, I imagine they aren't set up to accept any form of credit card to pay off existing balances.

They should change that as they would get their money right away.

Can I offer a small tidbit of advice? If you can pay off the total amount, you should probably do so or pay more than the minimum due as your interest rate at a dept store is probably the highest you will ever pay to borrow money.

Check your statement, it's probably close to 25% a month. If you have another credit card that offers 0% you might try to balance transfer but will still pay a fee to do so... but it should be less than the interest on your dept. store card.

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I won't swear to this as absolute fact, but I strongly suspect this is a purposeful restriction on the system intended in reality to prevent people from paying off one credit card with another and essentially kiting their debt, just like some people used to kite checks. The debit card prohibition may just be an unintended consequence.

Even if this weren't an "unintended consequence," credit card companies have incentive not to allow convenient payments - interest. They'd much rather have you on the hook for a 25% APR than have you pay it off in full all at once. Beyond that, I think there are substantial fees involved on retail debit transactions - I know WalMart and one of the processors for Visa and/or Mastercard were in a huge fight a year or two ago over how they were handling fees for debit card purchases, because they were non-trivial, so it wouldn't surprise me to see this have at least some role in why they can't be used for credit card payments...

Department store credit cards are the absolute bottom-dwellers, typically with the *worst* repayment terms and rates over "regular" cards, and they are a huge revenue source for the store. That's why they're always begging people at the front door to "get a free gift" for getting one...

If you can possibly get away from them, do so ASAP.

a debit card works just like a check does'nt it? it just saves paper and it goes thru your account faster. why would they not accept it?

this sounds like the reason to me.

Another reason could be that they're not willing to absorb the inevitable bank and credit card fees that results from using that card. I think there's something like a 2% transaction fee for every purchase that comes right off the top. Merchants are not allowed to add that 2% on top of the purchase price per their merchant agreements with Visa and Mastercard. The best they can do is build that into the price of whatever they sell. If you're paying off a debt, they would have to eat that 2%. (Don't quote me on that rate. Debit cards have a different rate from credit cards and I have no idea what the real rate is.)