Has anyone ever walked out of your coffee shop because they only had cash on them? I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything.
https://www.nssh.com/2020/04/philadelphias-ban-on-cashless-s...
I personally never use anything but cards since I have many of the high reward credit cards. But I've also had family members with tax liens or other problems that didn't allow them to get a bank account, that relied on family to pay bills, order things online for them, etc.
The gist was that if everybody is paying with credit cards, $50 will eventually whittle down to $0 because AmEx, et. Al. got $50 worth of fees after so many transactions (accountant pays grocer who pays dentist who pays hygienist who pays daycare, etc.). On one hand, what a huge waste of money. On the other hand, I as the consumer typically don’t get a discount for paying with cash, so why shouldn’t I take advantage of the “free” and secure payment option available to me?
Processing fees are not unique to cash. Banks charge cash processing fees to businesses too, and have for ever. Most shops will deposit all the cash received at the end of the day - perhaps every few days - with a bank.
This sounds like the real problem to solve. It's unacceptable for people to be unable to get a bank account and whatever cards to pay cashless
It's totally a fake problem that untrustworthy people can't be trusted in modern times with bank accounts. The risk is check bouncing. People don't "need" checks anymore though to function in the cashless world.
We already have prepaid card accounts that don't allow you to spend money you don't have. The only catch is that they're run as profiteering machines which extract fees at every turn.
I guess what I'm saying is, let USPS run an operation (like Green Dot, Vanilla, etc.) but with a fee structure based on the true cost of the service only. And the government should give Visa and Mastercard the choice of:
1. antitrust suit to break them up.
2. the USPS cards will be a V/MC, and V/MC will give them very deeply discounted interchange rates
3. a new independent USPS card network with low fees will be built AND commercialized for any issuer to use, and a regulation that anyone who accepts V/MC must also accept that network.
A recent immigrant from countries that don't issue biometric passports (like India) might struggle to open a bank account. I had to devote a lot of time to finding loopholes for my readers.
The status of such migrants is (AIUI) a fraught issue politically, and I'm not sure you can resolve the issues of the unbanked without resolving it.
At least it's a serious issue in Germany, especially for Indians whose passport is not accepted by many authentication services.
There are plenty of much poorer countries where cash has pretty much died out.
Imagine driving along in some mountainous, rural area in China. You stop at a little roadside shop in the middle of nowhere. You pull out your paper Renminbi bills to pay, and the shopkeeper looks at you like you're crazy. Everyone uses their smartphone to pay for everything, and yes, everyone has a smartphone.
If it's possible to transition entirely to digital payment in a country that was part of the Third World just one generation ago, it should be possible in the US.
I agree with you that businesses should accept cash for the reason that you’ve noted. The underlying problem is fuelled by the almost unique dysfunction of American bureaucracies. This is in cases where the systems aren’t maliciously designed to lock people out.
To play devil's advocate, credit cards are another way to get tracked, a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy, a way to be analyzed by the merchant, a way to get more explicitly prompted to pay a 20% tip, and more hassle than handing a $5 for a $4.73 coffee and walking off.
"Imagine these magical tokens with monetary value that I could instantly transfer to a merchant without waiting for my bill to come back!"
Going cashless only benefits the owner for not having to deal with counting cash, with potential worker theft, and (slim concern) robbery - things that, depending on the area and the market, are theoretical.
At the same time, I think it's neat that street performers and buskers have QR codes to Venmo. I think everyone should accept everything.
The pros may still outweigh the cons, but it’s not all roses with cards.
If your bar is being hit every week for robbery, the chance is no longer theoretical or a slim concern. Not sure about that bar, but marijuana dispensaries here get hit weekly because they are a cash only business. If the feds allowed it, they would go card-only very quickly.
I wouldn't patronize such a place because I'm not comfortable surrendering my credit card for an indeterminate amount of time, nor having any idea of how much money I've spent until I'm about to leave.
I mean by all means use your card everywhere but I think we should make a concerted effort to keep our options open.
And I see the same issue when I go to places that only take cash: people have to leave because they only have a credit card. Or they pony up some ridiculous fee to take cash from the ATM in the bar.
> credit cards are another way to get tracked
I personally don't care too much about this, but I can understand why some might.
> a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy
Put another way: a way for a duopoly of companies to get paid for providing a useful service to both businesses and customers. Now, you can argue that if there was more competition, fees would be lower, and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that the card networks are just taking and not providing any value.
> a way to be analyzed by the merchant
Basically the same as your tracking argument. Some care, some don't.
> a way to get more explicitly prompted to pay a 20% tip
Shrug? That's life? I feel pressured to tip regardless of how I pay. At least with the POS terminal I don't have to do math.
> and more hassle than handing a $5 for a $4.73 coffee and walking off.
It's pretty rare that I see a bill for an even amount of money. It's way more hassle to have to dig through my pockets for exact change, which I never have, so in reality I'm passing over a larger amount and waiting for the cashier to make change for me. And then I have to decide how much of that I want to leave as a tip. That's certainly more hassle than just tapping a card and a tip amount, and walking off.
They mostly do it for safety reasons. Being a target for being robbed for drug money just gets annoying after awhile. Getting rid of cash gets rid of that risk. They might lose some customers, but losing workers to stress about being robbed is a bigger problem these days.
While I worry about people without access to banking (mostly people without documentation, but also the poor), I think they're on a course to resolve that too, and I for one would be very happy to not have to pay that much in taxes while seeing others cheat the system and reap the benefits...
I also don't jog, but you get the point. At my gym I had a keychain bar code that worked great. Now I need my phone, phone charged, brightness up, their stupid app, signed in, open it up, click check-in. It turned a 2 second 1 gram device in to this whole thing. Why?? What a waste of technology and time.
No, I don't. Carrying a card is way easier than carrying cash while jogging. Thin, smaller, more lightweight.
I see one benefit of cash: the privacy.
I will have maids coming over tomorrow for the first time in a millennia and I will pay them however they prefer and I'm assuming that's cash. Card is amazing, but cash has its place it bothers me to see it sidelined.
I think you're ascribing malice to something that is largely a function of cost, safety, and hassle.
Yes, credit card fees are not free, but:
1. Managing cash is not free either. At the end of the shift / end of the day, you need employees to count cash and reconcile the amounts with receipts. Cash in excess of what the business wants to keep on hand needs to be transported to the bank and deposited, which costs employee (or manager/owner) time.
2. Businesses that accept cash are bigger targets for (possibly violent) theft. Your minimum wage barista might appreciate not having to worry about someone coming in with a gun and ordering them to empty the register into a bag, if there is nothing to empty into said bag. Transporting cash to the bank is another point where you can get robbed.
3. Related, there's also the risk of being paid with counterfeit bills. Granted, there's also the risk of stolen credit cards being used, and the business is usually forced to eat the cost of that. So this might turn out to be a wash (or perhaps, I suspect, this is actually worse with credit cards).
Certainly, from the customer's perspective, credit cards are a privacy leak, and require a good credit score or at least a bank with debit cards, and some people don't have access to either. But I think the solution to the latter is to make banking more accessible to people (I think allowing the post office to be a bank to anyone who needs it is a great way to make that happen). Not sure how to solve the privacy leak, though. Even with (unlikely) strong legislation against data collection and sharing/selling, there's always going to be a purchase trail.
And your point about jogging (or not-jogging) just doesn't make sense; it's far more convenient to carry a credit card when jogging than to carry cash.
I'm curious if credit cards actually are worse. I haven't had anyone ask for my ID to use a credit card in a long while. My hypothesis is that stolen credit cards are used online frequently, but rarely in person. Likely because it's easier to steal 10,000 credit card numbers online than in person, and because people are more likely to notice and report a card stolen if it's physically missing.
For as long as not everyone has access to a bank account or credit card I'll be concerned about fueling divisions in society.
I'm not from the US, unlike the origins of this discussion, but also hear this statement and have no reason to doubt it is true. But if you step out of the wealthy areas or even just look a little closer then the users of cash are visible.
I'm not sure where you live. I work in a fast-food place on a college campus. While the students generally use their meal-plans to buy food, the moment we have a "parents' weekend" or similar event, we do a lot of cash.
It is generally poorer people (who don't have access to banks) who have to use cash (or resort to alternative banking systems that charge exorbitant fees).
Tangential: I'm surprised that no one complains about these things. Google Search has become unbearable and Amazon is obviously bad these days. There's no way people aren't getting annoyed by the tech they use every day, yet you're right, no complaints.
It's almost always a silicon valley bubble
In Australia I haven't bothered to take any cash out in about a year, many businesses don't accept cash, and everything still seems to function just fine.
From the ones that left, most said they didn't have a card on them at the time and they'd return another time, but we did get a couple of people that did leave because they didn't agree to the policy.
This makes going cash free a pretty smart choice.
