I think that was the point of the originator of the thread - the technology is there, it's just not applied properly. It may have improved recently, but when visiting SF for a few weeks in 2013 and 2014 I was left scratching my head about how best to charge my Clipper card for Muni transit. Topping up the credit via the website had a waiting time of 1-2 working days, so if you were trying to catch a tram or bus into the city centre from the outer neighbourhoods, you had to plan ahead for having enough credit, especially when the weekend was coming up. At BART stations it was usually less problematic to charge the cards - assuming the machine worked, which wasn't always the case.

At any rate, the whole thing felt very uncivilised and anachronistic compared to my experiences in much of Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. (Japan's Pasmo and similar cards require cash for charging and largely don't accept credit cards, but you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere where you'd have to walk more than a block for an opportunity to charge them - or to find an ATM for obtaining the cash you need.)

But it's political resistance for valid reasons. Per the FDIC, 18% of Americans are underbanked https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/ and 8% are unbanked.

The real problem is 1.) banks are a cancer on society. Most banks these days charge you ridiculous fees if you don't have even a $1500 in the account 2.) the unbanked and underbanked aren't introduced enough to credit unions which are ideally their answer to having savings account that doesnt fuck them 3.) unforunately credit unions cant afford to take risk with offering those with poor credit ratings a credit card

Otherwise, consider yourself lucky to be posting on HackerNews from probably working a tech job to be arguing for non-cash accepting stores. Plenty of people don't have that luxury.