The popularity of banks with many of you is clearly quite low thanks to issues like penalty charges and poor customer service.

Now it seems as if shops have had enough too.

Many retailers have accused banks of charging too much to process the debit and credit card transactions that occur in stores.

Every time a credit or debit card purchase goes through, retailers have to pay a transaction charge, which on average is 17p on a purchase worth £20.

By contrast, charges for banking cash come to just 4p for £20.

See why the shops are irate?

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has stated that the banks' promotion of card use instead of cash was a "self serving" attempt to bring them more money.

Kevin Hawkins, director general of the BRC said:

"Banks have long abused their position by imposing much higher charges on retailers for processing card payments than cash."

"Clearly the banks have spotted that replacing cash with cards would mean a further boost to their profits," he added. APACS, the trade association for credit card providers, has not made any comment on this issue.

In the past forty years, the use of plastic cards (first credit cards, then store and debit cards) has transformed the way most of us shop. Using cheques when buying everyday items has almost died out, but cash is still very popular and is still going strong.

A survey taken by the BRC shows that cash still makes up 54% of all transactions, and 32% of all money spent in shops, stores and supermarkets.

The main advantage for retailers in accepting plastic cards has been the convenience and a reduction in the threat of being robbed. However the underlying charges for accepting the cards, levied on shops by the card issuers such as Mastercard and Visa, have been under scrutiny by regulators for a while now, both here in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Earlier in the year the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said it would investigate the so-called "interchange fees" that banks impose for processing their debit card payments. That was on top of its ongoing investigation of the fees that the card organisations, Visa and Mastercard, impose on shops for processing credit card purchases.

The OFT had previously described these fees as being little more than a tax on shoppers.

Clearly, with the amount of retailers complaining about the money being charged by card companies to process purchase, it seems that there is now a tax on shops too!

Credit card companies still making lots of money out of you!