HAMPTON ROADS, Va. – Jeff Miller, president of Miller Oil Co. in Norfolk, Virginia, and 2010-2011 NACS chairman, recently wrote an opinion piece in the Virginian Pilot, sharing the retailer’s perspective on how swipe fees impact his business. The text of his op-ed follows :

A few years ago, Congress decided to end bank robbery. Not the kind where guys in masks go into banks with guns, but rather the robberies banks pulled when they charged merchants like me outrageous fees to process every transaction in which a customer used a debit card.

The legislation Congress passed — called the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — helped alleviate the banks’ utterly unfair stranglehold over merchants.

But the Federal Reserve, which Congress put in charge of enforcing the law, didn’t follow through after heavy lobbying by the banks it is supposed to regulate. And so, in at least one way, the Fed has allowed things to get worse.

It’s hard to believe the people at the Federal Reserve didn’t know they were siding with credit-card companies and the same big banks that caused the 2008 crash.

That failure to follow Congress’ mandate hurts the little guy — the neighborhood florist, the corner convenience store, the small restaurateur.

Here’s what happened: The Federal Reserve interpreted the Durbin Amendment by limiting to about 25 cents the amount banks could charge on each transaction. Originally, the Fed said 12 cents was a fair number on which the banks could make a nice profit.

Nevertheless, 25 cents was an improvement. A subsequent study found the amendment saved consumers almost $6 billion in 2012, the year it took effect, and created almost 38,000 jobs in an economy that needed all the help it could get.

Of course, it would have been another $3 billion in savings if the Fed had stuck with the 12-cent cap. But it’s still progress in a market where two companies, Visa and MasterCard, control the vast majority of the business and fix fees in secret and without competition.

The big problem for merchants like me is that the Fed allowed banks to increase the fees they charge for small transactions like the ones in my stores.

Before, if a customer bought something like a candy bar or cup of coffee and charged just a few dollars on their debit card, the swipe fee was typically less than a dime, so the merchant might come out with a little profit even on a tiny sale. Now, though, banks are charging almost a quarter even for small items.

So: Somebody comes into one of my stores and uses a debit card to buy, say, a Coke and a candy bar for $2.50. I make almost 70 cents, and out of that comes 23 cents — or 33% of my gross profit — for the bank to process the transaction. According to the Federal Reserve, however, that transaction costs the bank less than 2 cents 90% of the time.

That’s more than a 1,000% profit margin for the bank, dwarfing my own profits, and I’ve got millions of dollars invested in each of my stores. That is wrong, and it got that way because Visa and MasterCard are allowed to fix the fees that their banks charge.

It’s not just unfair for business people. Because Visa and Master-Card control the market and keep raising those swipe fees, consumers pay higher prices for everything from gas to groceries, even if they don’t use a credit or debit card.

Outrageously steep credit-card fees right now add about 7 cents to the price of every gallon of gasoline sold in our area. Yet I can’t simply raise my prices every time I want, because I operate in a hyper-competitive business where my prices are posted on signs looming above the street.

We are essentially talking about a hidden tax that hurts everyone but the banks. These fees are now my second-highest operating cost after labor, more than rent or utilities. And they never slow down.

We merchants have sued the Federal Reserve to try to make it follow the law. But as the case goes on, the public and small retailers suffer.

It’s simply not right, and the Fed is smart enough to know it.

Earlier this month, a coalition of retailers, including NACS, asked the Supreme Court to hear an appeal on Federal Reserve rules that allow banks to charge unreasonably high "swipe fees" each time a shopper swipes a debit card.