There's a saying on Wall Street that goes something like this: the bulls make money, the bears make money, but the pigs get slaughtered. That's a message that some of the nation's largest retailers are hoping to drive home to the financial services industry.

At issue: what some retail industry leaders believe to be unbridled greed on the part of national credit card issuers.

Millions of American consumers who shell out 18%, 20%, or more in interest when they run a balance on their Visa or MasterCard would likely agree that the pricing practices of the credit card industry are distinctly piggish.

To be sure, consumers can avoid these outrageous charges simply by paying their balance in full each month, or by not using their charge card in the first place.

But that's not the case with respect to the credit card "interchange fees" that are drawing fire from the retail industry now.

These fees represent a percentage of each transaction that merchants are required to pay every time a consumer uses a credit or debit charge for a purchase. Because retailers are prohibited from passing these charges directly on to shoppers who use credit cards, the fees wind up incorporated in the price of merchandise whether it is paid for by plastic or paper.

According to the National Retail Federation, "that drives up prices for everyone and is especially unfair for customers who pay cash."

While the interchange fee on a typical $50 transaction may be a dollar or less, the money adds up fast. Last year Visa and MasterCard together imposed $17.4 billion in interchange fee charges on retailers--almost double the amount collected in 1998. By 2010, these fees are expected to nearly double again to $32.4 billion.

That's hardly pocket change. In fact current estimates indicate that credit card industry interchange fees cost the average U.S. household more than $230 per year.

Retailers are hurting, too. And as consumers become more comfortable using credit cards for supermarket purchases, these fees are cutting into the razor-thin operating margins of food chains.

At Kroger, one of the grocery chains groaning under the weight of stiff interchange fees, a whopping 60% of all transactions are now made using credit or debit cards.

As a result, that chain alone will be forced to shell out $350 million in credit card interchange fees this year.

Kroger has had enough. Along with a number of other national food and drug chains, the company has filed an antitrust lawsuit that accuses Visa of engaging in price-fixing and illegally restricting competition with respect to transaction fees. "The collective setting of interchange fees by Visa and its member banks constitutes horizontal price-fixing that leads to higher retail prices for our customers," Kroger general counsel Paul Heldman said.

Officials at Visa, however, contend that it's the retail industry that is behaving piggishly.

In a response to the antitrust charges, a spokesman for that company described the lawsuit as "another in a series of attempts by some merchants to receive all the value of electronic payments, while shifting their normal costs of doing business onto consumers."

According to Visa, the retailers involved in the suit are "asking courts to determine rates through price controls"--an approach that would be "bad for consumers, bad for merchants and bad for the economy."

For their part, retailers say they're not looking for price controls, but rather self-control by greedy credit card issuers.

"At a time when technology has made card authorization and processing faster, cheaper, safer and more efficient than ever, we believe that our customers should be receiving the benefit of declining interchange fees," Heldman said. "Instead, Visa is using its extraordinary market power to profit at our customers' expense."

Over the past five years credit card fees imposed on Kroger and its customers have increased 215%, and Visa has raised the company's interchange rate no less than 11 times during that period.

Now who's being piggish?

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