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Really? When you can pay with a card, you can pay by either EC (girocard; German thing, or maestro by mastercard, 500-600 million such cards in circulation worl

Really? When you can pay with a card, you can pay by either EC (girocard; German thing, or maestro by mastercard, 500-600 million such cards in circulation worldwide) or a regular credit/debit card (Visa, Mastercard, etc) almost always, and often stuff like Cirrus/VisaPlus is accepted too. That's a wide variety of options? What other major payment systems are missing?

harperlee 8y ago
Look, I'm speaking from personal experience only, but due to work needs I travel almost every week to Frankfurt (purportedly the financial capital of Europe) with an amex, a visa and a mastercard; and each time I pick a taxi or I go to a restaurant there is about a 50% chance they do not take anything but EC Karte, or Cash only. It is so annoying that at work we have a running Splitwise group of about 25 people because always someone does not bring enough cash on them, only some spare change from last day plus all the usual cards. This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden. So I think German is an outlier here, and in a bad way. It is not the worst problem in the world; I just said it is annoying.
- rndgermandude 8y ago
  I wasn't trying to say you're wrong, just genuinely curious as I never experienced that myself. Then again I'm German and would never pay a German cab with anything but cash :p But yeah, you need cash in Germany!
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden. With Euro cash you can pay in most of these countries (in my experience in cases of emergency it even should be possible to pay with Euro cash in UK, Switzerland and Sweden).
- kara_jade 8y ago
  That's not surprising. Transaction costs for credit card payments in Germany are higher (2 to 4 percent) than for electronic cash payments (0.3 to 0.95 percent). It's simply not feasible for many sellers to offer credit card payments, especially as everyone in Germany has an electronic cash card anyway.
- te0006 8y ago
  You might use an app like taxi.eu to call a taxi, which allows to add constraints like "credit cards accepted".

harperlee 8y ago

Look, I'm speaking from personal experience only, but due to work needs I travel almost every week to Frankfurt (purportedly the financial capital of Europe) with an amex, a visa and a mastercard; and each time I pick a taxi or I go to a restaurant there is about a 50% chance they do not take anything but EC Karte, or Cash only. It is so annoying that at work we have a running Splitwise group of about 25 people because always someone does not bring enough cash on them, only some spare change from last day plus all the usual cards. This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden. So I think German is an outlier here, and in a bad way. It is not the worst problem in the world; I just said it is annoying.

rndgermandude 8y ago
I wasn't trying to say you're wrong, just genuinely curious as I never experienced that myself. Then again I'm German and would never pay a German cab with anything but cash :p But yeah, you need cash in Germany!
wolfgke 8y ago
> This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden. With Euro cash you can pay in most of these countries (in my experience in cases of emergency it even should be possible to pay with Euro cash in UK, Switzerland and Sweden).
kara_jade 8y ago
That's not surprising. Transaction costs for credit card payments in Germany are higher (2 to 4 percent) than for electronic cash payments (0.3 to 0.95 percent). It's simply not feasible for many sellers to offer credit card payments, especially as everyone in Germany has an electronic cash card anyway.
te0006 8y ago
You might use an app like taxi.eu to call a taxi, which allows to add constraints like "credit cards accepted".