Why do banks and businesses charge a returned check fee if your check doesn’t clear, but if your debit card is declined it just is declined with no fees?
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Processing a check requires a small amount of human effort in order to accomplish. Not a lot, mind you, but there are time, wages, and equipment involved in that process. It used to be much more, prior to the development of several different technologies that are now utilized to dramatically increase efficiency and accuracy. Those fees you pay? They were established back when processing checks was a much more manual process, because banks understandably wanted to be compensated for the wasted time and effort in processing a bad check. The cost required to make up for the lost wages and etc. is much less now, but regulators have allowed banks to keep the fees at a disproportionately high level.
Businesses charge return check fees for more or less the same reasons: they are wasting time and energy trying to cash a bad check, and their own bank very likely charges them a fee for even submitting a bad check.
Debit cards, by contrast, can be processed almost instantaneously entirely by computers. Initially the debit machine just queries your bank to see if there are adequate funds available, and if not, then it rejects the transaction right then and there, saving everyone involved both time and money. If everything is good to go, the transaction will get fully and automagically processed some time later, and although the business’s bank may not actually receive the funds until a day or two later, they know with 100% certainty that they will get it.
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