It's another vile and intensely stupid legacy of the Clinton administration. Hundreds of years of understanding what a check is and is not was summarily thrown out by the Clinton administration.
Now the current situation is that if you present an "on-us" check to a bank, that bank can consider *you* to be their customer, whether or not you have an account with them.
Since you are now suddenly a customer, you can be charged a fee, even for presenting an "on-us" check.
It's outrageous, it's stupid, and it makes no sense with respect to the hundreds of years of legal precedent dealing with checks, but, hey, it makes the banks some more dinero.
All it has done at our company is make us look into alternative banks (there are plenty around, some aggressively courting our business). The other fees already had us meeting with some, and this is just accelerating the process.
I pay all my supplier's and everything else I buy with that card.
Because all of our income comes from taking credit cards as payment by doing this I reduce my CC processing fee down by 1 percent.
I take that 1 percent back as a cash reward and put it back into my account.