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Young millennial male, every single person I know uses Venmo. IMO this article largely misses the point of the app. It's replaced cash/checks is all, it's not s

by extr 9y ago

Young millennial male, every single person I know uses Venmo. IMO this article largely misses the point of the app. It's replaced cash/checks is all, it's not some huge social upheaval in the way we use money that needs to be analyzed. In my experience it's rarely used for splitting bills for dinner or picking up bar tabs (I can't remember the last time I went somewhere that wasn't able to split the bill on their end?), but more around casual "I'm going to go to the store, you need something?" "Yeah, get me some ice cream. I'll venmo you.". Or for utility payments among roommates. The guy who was nagging you to give him $3 cash for the cab ride is now requesting $3 from you on venmo for the uber, but it's the same guy, and he still needs to chill out and remember you split your case of beer with him last week.

cbhl 9y ago
For our generation, this pettiness goes the other way, too. I will literally try to buy lunch/coffee/dinner for someone, and after I've gone home, they've sent an unsolicited 'repayment' to me by Venmo. And on the other hand, it's difficult to "split your case of beer" with someone -- people are afraid to partake because they're worried you'll bill them afterwards, and they can't afford the $3 in this month's budget.
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  Wow, this sounds horrible. The day my friends think I'll bill them for splitting a case of beer is the day I've failed as a friend.
  - sethrin 9y ago
    Sigh. This reminds me of an ex-roommate. So I worked at a factory and he was a notary or some such function connected with real estate, working from home. One day I was running late for work, which was maybe fifteen minutes away by bicycle, and asked if he didn't mind giving me a lift. About halfway there he mentioned casually, "Oh, just so you know, I'll be billing you at my normal rate ($60/hr) for this ride." Thanks for the trouble, just pull over and I'll walk, buddy. People may or may not have sane ideas about friendship and money.
    - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
      That's a weird comment on his part, but I think there is often a large mismatch between the cost that a carless person assigns to "bumming a ride" and the cost that the car owner assigns to that. If you are not a car owner, you may not realize how much of a pain in the ass it is to stop whatever you are doing and play taxi.
      - bb611 9y ago
        The solution seems simple: "I can't, I'm busy right now." That's what people say when someone asks them to do something they don't want to, or where the cost outweighs the benefit.
      - sethrin 9y ago
        He believed that money was God's way of showing favor, and somehow that worked out to, "Anything I do to get money is okay." He ended up appropriating most of my possessions. This was of course the first and last time I asked for a lift from that guy, so if you like you can consider him to have appropriately valued his time and effort. However, not mentioning that until we were in the car and driving was frankly extortionate. As I recall, he did back down on the charge rather than pull over, but it provided an extremely sharp life lesson.
        lawnchair_larry 9y ago
        Yeah, the two choices are either provide a free ride or don't provide one at all. Billing people for rides is bizarre behavior.
  - citizenkeen 9y ago
    Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how I feel. If someone grabs a tab and sends me a Venmo bill, I'll happily send them their money. I would have rather grabbed the tab the next time. I won't be doing both. (And vis a versa - If I say "I've got the tab" and the person sent me money, I'd be much less likely to invite them out in the future. I'd rather they just invited me out and grabbed a round.)
- extr 9y ago
  I'm not sure this is anything new though. Even before Venmo, I've always had friends who were overly concerned with keeping things "even" between us and friends who were very loose with money and wouldn't mind spotting me $20 with no immediate expectation of repayment. It's one of those social things that really depends on the history, social norms, income...etc of those involved. I try to just go with whatever makes people comfortable without thinking about it too much. And for friends I already have a set of expectations. Also, beer example was just meant to highlight that friend we all have who practices "selective accounting" with our informal running tab. If I had any suspicion that $3 is make or break to someone I would gladly pay them what's owed and forget about the beer. Beer (and all vices really) have their own set of norms.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  IMO, politeness should also take account norms that make the other party feel the most comfortable (within reason of course). It took me a long time to learn that when your friend's dad tells you 'Please just call me John', continuing to address him as 'Mr. Smith' is less polite, not more. Same thing with money.
Sir_Substance 9y ago
>Young millennial male, every single person I know uses Venmo. Young millennial male, I'd never heard of this thing until now. These things tend to be emblematic of poor local banking infrastructure. This reminds me a lot of echocash[1]. [1] https://www.econet.co.zw/ecocash/ https://www.econet.co.zw/ecocash/
- cbhl 9y ago
  I believe Venmo is US-only. Determining whether the US has poor local banking infra is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    It does. (European, lived 8 years in the US in 2 installments of 4 years each).
    - regulation_d 9y ago
      In what way? Is small, easy P2P payments a solved problem in Europe?
      - detaro 9y ago
        Bank transfer. No fees, fast enough (at least inside a country next business day, I think internationally it's allowed to be a bit slower?), if you want to do it mobile there are enough banks that have apps.
        regulation_d 9y ago
        I can do bank transfers from my bank, but I feel awkward saying, "hey, can I get your routing and account number?" Even if I didn't feel awkward, with Venmo and Square Cash, I have all the information I need if either we're FB friends or have their email address.
        9y ago
aggie 9y ago
In my experience, many restaurants have a limit on how many ways they can split the bill, usually 2-4, so for larger groups venmo is an easy way to solve the issue. And there certainly are some restaurants that don't split at all (seems to be a regional thing).
- greggyb 9y ago
  Restaurants have a limit on how many ways they will split the bill. I used to wait tables and it's annoying to split many ways, but every POS system I ever used allowed splitting many ways. I never tested for an upper limit, but I soul routinely split to mid-teens of separate checks.
- floatrock 9y ago
  I get that part of the reason is credit card merchant fees -- someone is paying for my 2x dining-out credit card points, after all. But part of the reason also is wait staff time... time spent running six separate cards is time not spent getting drinks or food. Maybe I'm just a tech-city millennial who hates interacting with people, but I've always kinda wondered why there isn't any POS system that prints out a QR or text code you can punch into your smartphone to pull up a digital receipt that you can claim what items were yours, auto-tally tax and tip, and just pay for it digitally or yes, even venmo-invoice everyone in the group. Yes, I realize this is exactly the behavior the article was talking about it, but honestly, that article was a little "get off my lawn"-ish. If it's a beer, sure, I'll get a round, but if it's a 6-person birthday party where some people get the $12 salad because they're making teacher salary and the tech-bro's get the $36 steak but you all still want to be friends without the awkwardness different financial or socioeconomic situations getting in the way, then yes, everyone paying whatever they ordered makes sense. Technology enables new behaviors and new norms, honestly. If it means the guy or girl who gets 2x points on restaurant bills and making tech money fronts the bill and venmos what everyone ordered later, so be it. I would ask why isn't that even easier yet with my self-invoice-via-digital-bill-and-save-the-server-from-running-6-separate-cards app?
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Red Robin has little tablets at the table you can use to select your items and pay your portion of the bill (among other things, like signal a waiter or play silly games). I thought it was clever. That said, the situation where someone ordered a $12 entree while someone else ordered a $36 one was solved when everyone paid in cash -- you just throw in your portion. It was only when everyone was trying to pay by card that this became an issue (which Venmo and ilk addressed). People claiming that paying different amounts is some kind of "modern" problem are just ignorant of history -- everyone paying by card and splitting a bill being difficult is the modern problem.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rc_kas 9y ago
"every single person I know uses Venmo" How does that happen. I don't know a single person who uses Venmo. Not one. I know a lot of people and I work in Tech.
- tikhonj 9y ago
  Venmo is, effectively, a social network; it's going to get popular along social lines. Depending on whether it's caught on among your immediate friends and acquaintances, you'd expect to either know a lot of people using Venmo or very few.
  - balladeer 9y ago
    In India a lot of people use Splitwise. I am on it and my bill splitting, and personal borrowing/leding records are handled by the app. Though it doesn't handle actual money transfers yet; they have no such integrations. Is Venmo similar? https://www.splitwise.com https://www.splitwise.com
    - aviraldg 9y ago
      They've recently added support for settling via Paytm (which is the most popular mobile wallet in India) and I believe they also support Paypal. I love Splitwise; almost all of my friends at uni use it and pretty much all shared expenses go on it. I also use Walnut (http://www.getwalnut.com/ http://www.getwalnut.com/), not for the settlement feature, but rather for the expense tracking which automatically reads SMSes and builds up monthly expense reports.
      - skinnymuch 9y ago
        Who is they in your first paragraph? Venmo? Or Splitwise? Venmo supporting PayPal makes complete sense considering it is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of PayPal. If it's Splitwise, then it seems like PayPal doesn't care so much for propping up Venmo. Interesting either way. Walnut seems like an interesting product. Thanks for the link.
robbintt 9y ago
I don't mind being a wet blanket and these are communications issues not payment facilitation issues. Explain to people why it is frustrating that they don't communicate how you're going to split things before doing it and don't expect anything back when you give away half a case of beer. Both are equal offenses in the same class.
vowelless 9y ago
I got my landlord onto Venmo to pay utilities. She wanted a check slipped under her door. That wasn't happening. Now she just requests the amount every month and all I have to do is tap "Pay".
- greggarious 9y ago
  Did you look into online bill pay? I had a landlord who wanted paid by check... I was able to set up an online bill pay with my credit union that automatically mailed out a physical check each month. I was happy because I could automate it like I did my other bills, she was happy because she didn't have to pay credit card processing fees.
- copperx 9y ago
  As the other HNer noted below, we've had free BillPay in banks for decades now. It's also safer than Venmo.
EliRivers 9y ago
Far other end of what often gets labelled "millenial". Hadn't heard of Venmo until this HN thread. I do live in the UK where interbank transfer of cash is almost instant and free of charge, so the need for it is rather less, I suspect.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Yeah, the UK has so much contactless payment and cheap or free transfers that it has, somewhat ironically, limited competition in this sector. Even things like Google Wallet & Apple Pay seem to be treated with a “but... why?” attitude.
  - nindalf 9y ago
    From my experience in the UK, those apps allow you to leave your card at home. Not much of a difference if you're carrying a wallet anyway, but if you carry just a phone and a card + ID in the phone case, you can now ditch the card. Otherwise I don't see the benefit.
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      Had my phone's NFC fail me (especially at tube barriers) enough times to recommend perhaps not relying solely on a phone for payments.
    - EliRivers 9y ago
      Ha. I generally leave the phone at home and just take a card. Slimmest wallet I've ever had. I've never carried ID, though. That would double the size of my wallet :(
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    Surprising that this is the first mention of Apple Pay in the thread, given the upcoming release in iOS 11. I wonder how they'll resolve these issues. Will commercial transactions be technically forbidden? For how long, and for what reasons, will transactions be able to be reversed? When can we feel comfortable that the money is "really there"?
kermittd 9y ago
Also a millennial male, same exact thing.
Bahamut 9y ago
As someone in their early 30s living in the Valley, I actually don’t know too many people who uses Venmo. My friends are generally not too hung up on having exact numbers, as it isn’t worth the awkwardness & gives the opportunity for someone to be generous. Maybe I generally just know decent human beings though. Greediness/cheapness is just not a problem in my circles.
- Xenograph 9y ago
  You seem to be implying that people who use Venmo and/or prefer to deal in exact numbers aren't decent human beings. I suggest you reevaluate that position and consider how greed might not be the root cause of someone behaving that way. I'd also argue that using a Venmo doesn't take away the opportunity for someone to be generous. Venmo isn't much different from cash except that it makes it more convenient to be precise - it certainly doesn't force anyone to be precise though.
curiousGambler 9y ago
My friend groups use it for dinner etc. despite most places being able to split checks because it's easier for us to figure it out amongst ourselves than burden some waitress with splitting it (even if their software makes it easy, they still have to take four cards and run them all and return them to their proper owners and such).
throwaway91111 9y ago
It has only made splitting the check easier; i don't see it replacing cash any time soon.
smb06 9y ago
How is Venmo any different from PayPal other than the social network aspect of it? Why can't you just "Paypal it to you"? It's because Venmo adds the voyeuristic aspect to an otherwise boring task of money transfer that PayPal had been doing just fine.

by extr 9y ago

cbhl 9y ago

For our generation, this pettiness goes the other way, too. I will literally try to buy lunch/coffee/dinner for someone, and after I've gone home, they've sent an unsolicited 'repayment' to me by Venmo. And on the other hand, it's difficult to "split your case of beer" with someone -- people are afraid to partake because they're worried you'll bill them afterwards, and they can't afford the $3 in this month's budget.

FireBeyond 9y ago
Wow, this sounds horrible. The day my friends think I'll bill them for splitting a case of beer is the day I've failed as a friend.
- sethrin 9y ago
  Sigh. This reminds me of an ex-roommate. So I worked at a factory and he was a notary or some such function connected with real estate, working from home. One day I was running late for work, which was maybe fifteen minutes away by bicycle, and asked if he didn't mind giving me a lift. About halfway there he mentioned casually, "Oh, just so you know, I'll be billing you at my normal rate ($60/hr) for this ride." Thanks for the trouble, just pull over and I'll walk, buddy. People may or may not have sane ideas about friendship and money.
  - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
    That's a weird comment on his part, but I think there is often a large mismatch between the cost that a carless person assigns to "bumming a ride" and the cost that the car owner assigns to that. If you are not a car owner, you may not realize how much of a pain in the ass it is to stop whatever you are doing and play taxi.
    - bb611 9y ago
      The solution seems simple: "I can't, I'm busy right now." That's what people say when someone asks them to do something they don't want to, or where the cost outweighs the benefit.
    - sethrin 9y ago
      He believed that money was God's way of showing favor, and somehow that worked out to, "Anything I do to get money is okay." He ended up appropriating most of my possessions. This was of course the first and last time I asked for a lift from that guy, so if you like you can consider him to have appropriately valued his time and effort. However, not mentioning that until we were in the car and driving was frankly extortionate. As I recall, he did back down on the charge rather than pull over, but it provided an extremely sharp life lesson.
      - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
        Yeah, the two choices are either provide a free ride or don't provide one at all. Billing people for rides is bizarre behavior.
- citizenkeen 9y ago
  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how I feel. If someone grabs a tab and sends me a Venmo bill, I'll happily send them their money. I would have rather grabbed the tab the next time. I won't be doing both. (And vis a versa - If I say "I've got the tab" and the person sent me money, I'd be much less likely to invite them out in the future. I'd rather they just invited me out and grabbed a round.)
extr 9y ago
I'm not sure this is anything new though. Even before Venmo, I've always had friends who were overly concerned with keeping things "even" between us and friends who were very loose with money and wouldn't mind spotting me $20 with no immediate expectation of repayment. It's one of those social things that really depends on the history, social norms, income...etc of those involved. I try to just go with whatever makes people comfortable without thinking about it too much. And for friends I already have a set of expectations. Also, beer example was just meant to highlight that friend we all have who practices "selective accounting" with our informal running tab. If I had any suspicion that $3 is make or break to someone I would gladly pay them what's owed and forget about the beer. Beer (and all vices really) have their own set of norms.
smallnamespace 9y ago
IMO, politeness should also take account norms that make the other party feel the most comfortable (within reason of course). It took me a long time to learn that when your friend's dad tells you 'Please just call me John', continuing to address him as 'Mr. Smith' is less polite, not more. Same thing with money.

Sir_Substance 9y ago

>Young millennial male, every single person I know uses Venmo. Young millennial male, I'd never heard of this thing until now. These things tend to be emblematic of poor local banking infrastructure. This reminds me a lot of echocash[1]. [1] https://www.econet.co.zw/ecocash/ https://www.econet.co.zw/ecocash/

cbhl 9y ago
I believe Venmo is US-only. Determining whether the US has poor local banking infra is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)
- mpweiher 9y ago
  It does. (European, lived 8 years in the US in 2 installments of 4 years each).
  - regulation_d 9y ago
    In what way? Is small, easy P2P payments a solved problem in Europe?
    - detaro 9y ago
      Bank transfer. No fees, fast enough (at least inside a country next business day, I think internationally it's allowed to be a bit slower?), if you want to do it mobile there are enough banks that have apps.
      - regulation_d 9y ago
        I can do bank transfers from my bank, but I feel awkward saying, "hey, can I get your routing and account number?" Even if I didn't feel awkward, with Venmo and Square Cash, I have all the information I need if either we're FB friends or have their email address.
        9y ago

aggie 9y ago

In my experience, many restaurants have a limit on how many ways they can split the bill, usually 2-4, so for larger groups venmo is an easy way to solve the issue. And there certainly are some restaurants that don't split at all (seems to be a regional thing).

greggyb 9y ago
Restaurants have a limit on how many ways they will split the bill. I used to wait tables and it's annoying to split many ways, but every POS system I ever used allowed splitting many ways. I never tested for an upper limit, but I soul routinely split to mid-teens of separate checks.
floatrock 9y ago
I get that part of the reason is credit card merchant fees -- someone is paying for my 2x dining-out credit card points, after all. But part of the reason also is wait staff time... time spent running six separate cards is time not spent getting drinks or food. Maybe I'm just a tech-city millennial who hates interacting with people, but I've always kinda wondered why there isn't any POS system that prints out a QR or text code you can punch into your smartphone to pull up a digital receipt that you can claim what items were yours, auto-tally tax and tip, and just pay for it digitally or yes, even venmo-invoice everyone in the group. Yes, I realize this is exactly the behavior the article was talking about it, but honestly, that article was a little "get off my lawn"-ish. If it's a beer, sure, I'll get a round, but if it's a 6-person birthday party where some people get the $12 salad because they're making teacher salary and the tech-bro's get the $36 steak but you all still want to be friends without the awkwardness different financial or socioeconomic situations getting in the way, then yes, everyone paying whatever they ordered makes sense. Technology enables new behaviors and new norms, honestly. If it means the guy or girl who gets 2x points on restaurant bills and making tech money fronts the bill and venmos what everyone ordered later, so be it. I would ask why isn't that even easier yet with my self-invoice-via-digital-bill-and-save-the-server-from-running-6-separate-cards app?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Red Robin has little tablets at the table you can use to select your items and pay your portion of the bill (among other things, like signal a waiter or play silly games). I thought it was clever. That said, the situation where someone ordered a $12 entree while someone else ordered a $36 one was solved when everyone paid in cash -- you just throw in your portion. It was only when everyone was trying to pay by card that this became an issue (which Venmo and ilk addressed). People claiming that paying different amounts is some kind of "modern" problem are just ignorant of history -- everyone paying by card and splitting a bill being difficult is the modern problem.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rc_kas 9y ago

"every single person I know uses Venmo" How does that happen. I don't know a single person who uses Venmo. Not one. I know a lot of people and I work in Tech.

tikhonj 9y ago
Venmo is, effectively, a social network; it's going to get popular along social lines. Depending on whether it's caught on among your immediate friends and acquaintances, you'd expect to either know a lot of people using Venmo or very few.
- balladeer 9y ago
  In India a lot of people use Splitwise. I am on it and my bill splitting, and personal borrowing/leding records are handled by the app. Though it doesn't handle actual money transfers yet; they have no such integrations. Is Venmo similar? https://www.splitwise.com https://www.splitwise.com
  - aviraldg 9y ago
    They've recently added support for settling via Paytm (which is the most popular mobile wallet in India) and I believe they also support Paypal. I love Splitwise; almost all of my friends at uni use it and pretty much all shared expenses go on it. I also use Walnut (http://www.getwalnut.com/ http://www.getwalnut.com/), not for the settlement feature, but rather for the expense tracking which automatically reads SMSes and builds up monthly expense reports.
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      Who is they in your first paragraph? Venmo? Or Splitwise? Venmo supporting PayPal makes complete sense considering it is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of PayPal. If it's Splitwise, then it seems like PayPal doesn't care so much for propping up Venmo. Interesting either way. Walnut seems like an interesting product. Thanks for the link.

robbintt 9y ago

I don't mind being a wet blanket and these are communications issues not payment facilitation issues. Explain to people why it is frustrating that they don't communicate how you're going to split things before doing it and don't expect anything back when you give away half a case of beer. Both are equal offenses in the same class.

vowelless 9y ago

I got my landlord onto Venmo to pay utilities. She wanted a check slipped under her door. That wasn't happening. Now she just requests the amount every month and all I have to do is tap "Pay".

greggarious 9y ago
Did you look into online bill pay? I had a landlord who wanted paid by check... I was able to set up an online bill pay with my credit union that automatically mailed out a physical check each month. I was happy because I could automate it like I did my other bills, she was happy because she didn't have to pay credit card processing fees.
copperx 9y ago
As the other HNer noted below, we've had free BillPay in banks for decades now. It's also safer than Venmo.

EliRivers 9y ago

Far other end of what often gets labelled "millenial". Hadn't heard of Venmo until this HN thread. I do live in the UK where interbank transfer of cash is almost instant and free of charge, so the need for it is rather less, I suspect.

abritinthebay 9y ago
Yeah, the UK has so much contactless payment and cheap or free transfers that it has, somewhat ironically, limited competition in this sector. Even things like Google Wallet & Apple Pay seem to be treated with a “but... why?” attitude.
- nindalf 9y ago
  From my experience in the UK, those apps allow you to leave your card at home. Not much of a difference if you're carrying a wallet anyway, but if you carry just a phone and a card + ID in the phone case, you can now ditch the card. Otherwise I don't see the benefit.
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    Had my phone's NFC fail me (especially at tube barriers) enough times to recommend perhaps not relying solely on a phone for payments.
  - EliRivers 9y ago
    Ha. I generally leave the phone at home and just take a card. Slimmest wallet I've ever had. I've never carried ID, though. That would double the size of my wallet :(
- gnicholas 9y ago
  Surprising that this is the first mention of Apple Pay in the thread, given the upcoming release in iOS 11. I wonder how they'll resolve these issues. Will commercial transactions be technically forbidden? For how long, and for what reasons, will transactions be able to be reversed? When can we feel comfortable that the money is "really there"?

kermittd 9y ago

Also a millennial male, same exact thing.

Bahamut 9y ago

As someone in their early 30s living in the Valley, I actually don’t know too many people who uses Venmo. My friends are generally not too hung up on having exact numbers, as it isn’t worth the awkwardness & gives the opportunity for someone to be generous. Maybe I generally just know decent human beings though. Greediness/cheapness is just not a problem in my circles.

Xenograph 9y ago
You seem to be implying that people who use Venmo and/or prefer to deal in exact numbers aren't decent human beings. I suggest you reevaluate that position and consider how greed might not be the root cause of someone behaving that way. I'd also argue that using a Venmo doesn't take away the opportunity for someone to be generous. Venmo isn't much different from cash except that it makes it more convenient to be precise - it certainly doesn't force anyone to be precise though.

curiousGambler 9y ago

My friend groups use it for dinner etc. despite most places being able to split checks because it's easier for us to figure it out amongst ourselves than burden some waitress with splitting it (even if their software makes it easy, they still have to take four cards and run them all and return them to their proper owners and such).

throwaway91111 9y ago

It has only made splitting the check easier; i don't see it replacing cash any time soon.

smb06 9y ago

How is Venmo any different from PayPal other than the social network aspect of it? Why can't you just "Paypal it to you"? It's because Venmo adds the voyeuristic aspect to an otherwise boring task of money transfer that PayPal had been doing just fine.