7 ms·

New York on track to ban cashless stores and restaurants

34 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

Kaibeezy 7y ago
Grande skinny matcha latte, please. $8.75? I’ve got a musket ball and this shiny bead, will that cover it?
- fenk85 7y ago
  Why the sarcasm? Here in Ireland a major bank was down for several days because contractor of bank located in India screwed up a production deployment or something, resulting in hundreds of thousands of transactions having to be manually reconciled. In that time people had no access to their money, no tap and pay, chip and pin etc, nothing. That was quite a lesson in importance of cash, another lesson was about a dozen years ago when all the banks here went to the wall and had to be nationalised in order prevent bank runs.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    OP thinks only luddites use cash. PS OP, in the 1700s you'd probably issue a writ of payment and the shopkeeper would add the purchase to your tab, which you'd pay off in full at a later date. Unless you were a total stranger to that establishment, then you'd probably be paying at the time of purchase. Let's get our jokes historical accurate.
    - Kaibeezy 7y ago
      1640 and, yes, a total stranger, to be precise. I leveraged someone else's research.
  - Kaibeezy 7y ago
    Sarcasm, nah, just ordinary common-or-garden comedy. Also a literary reference. Anyone? All seriousness aside, if a business wants to be cashless, that’s a business decision, not religion. If the system goes down, they can dogmatically refuse to function, or they can place a large can on the counter and get on with it.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Ireland famously survived a six month lock out by nearly every bank in the seventies, with no harm to the economy. Pubs were local guides to credit worthiness, larger shops cashed cheques so businesses could pay staff (an era when many were still paid in cash), so cash could go round the system again, and cheques were countersigned and passed on dozens and dozens of times -- effectively becoming variable size bank notes. It's a fascinating story, and quite remarkable how little effect no banking had.
    - frereubu 7y ago
      I'd never heard of this - fascinating. For others who are interested, there's a decent, referenced, account from the Bank of England's blog here: https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/01/20/the-cheque-republic-money-in-a-modern-economy-with-no-banks/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/01/20/the-cheque-republic... Doesn't sound like there was "no harm to the economy" though, except in the broader sense. A quote from an Irish building contractor cited in the article: "I employ only 10 people. If it hadn’t been for the bank strike I’d be hiring 30. I’d say I’ve lost up to £20,000 over it ... One of my problems is finding the money to pay the wages. I run round from Wednesday to Friday to scrape them up, and in that time I can do no other work."
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        Oh sure, I've no doubt there were individuals and some businesses quite badly affected, but look back at the overall growth, national and regional statistics and the periods with strikes or lock-outs are simply undetectable if not highlighted for you. Sales and growth figures weren't noticeably harmed. No doubt if you were new to an area, didn't yet have a local or just weren't a pub goer, you might have had more trouble than most. The article also notes the steady stream of people going down to the local department store and other larger shops once a week, to cash their wages, or a wages cheque to pay their factory workers. Pubs were accumulating cashed cheques from regulars and some making smaller loans. The real surprise for me is how smoothly they coped, and how little fall out there seemed to be when banks reopened. Though of course there were some of the millions of cheques doing the rounds that did bounce. I've seen far less about knock on effects after reopening like that, but it's usually described in a way that makes it seem "far less than you would expect".
  - whb07 7y ago
    Just means you need a better banking institution. By the way this highlights the need for something like Bitcoin.
huffmsa 7y ago
Funny isn't it how these stores don't close when their POS system goes down but are more than happy to take cash.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Why's that funny? It's not like it exposes some hypocrisy or moral duplicity. They'd rather not accept cash because it's bulky, dirty, slow, and expensive to handle. But if they can't accept anything else for a large number of customers for some reason they will go back to it.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    It is hypocrisy to a certain extent. Cash only works because people accept it. It depends upon enough people accepting it, because only then enough of physical cash will circulate in order to make maintaining all the infrastructure (printing it, putting ATMs up, offering cash handling for merchants etc.) cost-effective enough for it to be done. If suddenly 95% of cash acceptance was dropped, a lot of that infrastructure will vanish, forcing the remaining 5% to drop cash acceptance as well...a death spiral, ultimately ending with the elimination of cash and thus also the elimination of the very fallback that these stores mentioned by the OP relied upon. Consider the cost of accepting cash an insurance premium against technical failures in the electronic payment networks and your POS systems.
jedimastert 7y ago
> Businesses that still want cashless transactions can provide a machine that exchanges cash for a gift card, but must accept cash if the machine breaks down, according to the new law. This would be a huge issue to me. I will admit that I don't live in NYC, but if I was to travel there on business and a random restaurant made me trade in $20 for a gift card to pay for a $8 meal in a place that I will probably never go back to, that's $12 out of my pocket that I paid in "cash is inconvenient" tax to that restaurant. Even worse, if I go to a store all the time (e.g. it's the only grocery store within walking distance and I don't have a car) but I'm underbanked, then I have to continually keep money in their "bank". > "Your total comes out to $20 but you only have $8 in store-bucks! Don't have exactly $12 in cash? That's a shame. I guess you'll have to come back to spend the rest!" Later you find out that the gift cards expire. Oops.
- seibelj 7y ago
  That decision is up to the restaurant. They could also just accept cash, if people like you stop frequenting their businesses.
  - ken 7y ago
    Are they required to tell you? I've been to more than one restaurant that said "sorry, we don't take cash" when there was no signage to inform me of this fact.
- jon889 7y ago
  Can't you just use card?
- diebeforei485 7y ago
  In NYC you could walk into a CVS or DuaneReade and use cash to purchase a prepaid Visa card that works anywhere Visa cards are accepted.
  - codazoda 7y ago
    Where I live these cards are expensive. For example, I considered buying one for a $60 a year service. The card itself costs just $1, but there is a $6.95 per month fee. So it costs me $7.95, minimum, to use one of these (13%). There are also fees for reloading the cards without EFT. If you keep the card all year it costs $83.40.
miggol 7y ago
As someone who in the past year has only used cash to pay for illicit substances, I was quite surprised by the title. Why punish business owners for choosing a more efficient and safe payment method? But having read the article, well, I see it differently. I did not know that cash still played such an indispensable role in the lives of many vulnerable groups in the U.S.. Does anyone have more info on what is meant by "alternative financial services"? I'm guessing they're not referring to bitcoin...
- Izkata 7y ago
  > I did not know that cash still played such an indispensable role in the lives of many vulnerable groups in the U.S.. I'm not even close to "a vulnerable group", but I still use cash for convenience. It's faster than card, most places don't have phone-based payments (I don't use them anyway, never felt worthwhile), and I don't clutter up my bank statements with daily purchases (lunch, groceries, etc).
diebeforei485 7y ago
All this concern about the unbanked/underbanked could be more effectively channeled into making banking more accessible IMO. As an example, the city could provide a free reloadable prepaid card to people who qualify as underbanked (based on some combination of income and residential address). Does this bill mean car dealerships (more popular in the outer boroughs than most people think) and jewelry shops will no longer be able to refuse briefcases full of cash as payment?
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  NYC's ability to place pressure on retailers in NYC is higher than its ability to place pressure on national and international banks.
- cesarb 7y ago
  > As an example, the city could provide a free reloadable prepaid card to people who qualify as underbanked (based on some combination of income and residential address). Then you still have the people who are underbanked for some reason but don't qualify as underbanked under that criteria. The only reliable way to do it would be to provide it to everyone, no questions asked (you can't even require proof of identity or residence, otherwise you'd still have the homeless people who lost their documents and can't get new ones). In the end, that reloadable prepaid card becomes a more complicated, less reliable form of physical cash.
  - jedieaston 7y ago
    Hasn’t this already been resolved in NYC by the MetroCard? (Which is going away in a few years, last I heard, but it’s a prepaid card that everyone has access to.)
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    And this will never exist because of money laundering and KYC. Cash is just easier.
- farrisbris 7y ago
  Its not all about cash vs non-cash. It can also be about privacy. You might not want some embarrasing item on your bank statement for a number of reasons. I would love a reloadable prepaid anonymous card i could use instead of my own in my everyday life. I would probably use only that if i could find one. There is no such option afaik where i live though. And we are transitioning very fast to cashless. ( Norway )
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
I find this highly surprising (in a good way). NYC is home to an industry that stands to benefit from a cashless economy and home to a government that never seems to turn down an increase in their ability to put people under a metaphorical microscope. I would have predicted they would be one of the first places to ban cash and one of the last to mandate businesses accept cash. I'm really happy to see consumer protection winning out over private interest for money and state interest for power but damn is that a curve ball in this day and age.
ada1981 7y ago
The opportunity might be for generic in store cash -> debit card machines that can be used anywhere.
- ada1981 7y ago
  Unless the law says you can’t charge a fee for the debit cards...
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
Couldn’t this be effectively curtailed by requiring exact change only?
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chrisseaton 7y ago
Quirky related trivia point when talking about legal tender - Scottish bank notes aren't legal tender, either in Scotland or anywhere else!
mikece 7y ago
From the Federal Reserve website: Q. Is it legal for a business in the United States to refuse cash as a form of payment? A. Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise. Link: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Is a transaction yet to occur, or that can be cancelled easily when posted terms aren't met, really a 'debt' in the legal sense, though?
  - Slartie 7y ago
    This is probably the loophole by which both statements "cash is legal tender for all debts" and "not accepting cash is legal" can coexist. There is no debt if the transaction does not happen because one of the participants is unwilling to enter it for some reason (with the reason being that the other person does want to pay cash). Banning specific reasons for not making business is possible however (it is done to protect ethnic minorities for example), so the situation can probably easily be changed by legislation that bans "wants to pay in cash" as a legit reason for not entering into a transaction at stores that are open to the general public.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  I read through this statute at some point awhile back. To my understanding, one way businesses get around this is by charging money before the product/service first--essentially putting themselves in "debt" first. By not providing the product/service until you pay, you aren't arguably in any potential form of debt and a business can dictate the form of payment they want. If you pay after receiving a service, then you could loosely be considered in debt. Usually, that doesn't hold enough water from what I read and it really means, until you go to court and have an established debt, you're forced to pay through whatever mechanisms were agreed to in the transaction. Only then does it have to be payable by cash. It's interesting to me because the transactions you're most likely to have cash on hand and pay for are items most would never have to go in debt for (a coffee, lunch, etc.) whereas large transactions you may need to go in debt for ideally use some other non-cash medium (loan, cashiers check, etc.). Basically makes cash useless (why I rarely carry more than say $50 anymore). More interestingly, you'll see businesses adapt quickly to accept cash when their electronic payment/management system goes down for a day. They're incredibly resourceful when it's convenient for themselves. I've had this happen at a coffee shop that was cashless that suddenly decided they'd accept cash when the other option was to not make money.
abalos 7y ago
This strikes me as ridiculous and heavy-handed. We should focus on finding a way to provide vulnerable groups a way to pay at cashless stores rather than increasing the overhead of operating a business (accepting cash, maintaining change, coordinating bank deposits, etc.). Many of these places are coffee shops where their entire ledger is automated. How can we complain that small businesses are closing in NYC and then continue to add regulations which may make it harder for them to operate? That seems like an oxymoron.
- mech1234 7y ago
  The vulnerable are often underbanked. They might not have a bank account, debit or credit card, or smartphone with Venmo/Cash app/(whatever app is popular today). Cash is the easiest way to help vulnerable groups. If a homeless person wants to buy a cheeseburger, its better to accept the cash rather than have him fill out FORM NY-892-F INDIVIDUAL RETAIL ESTABLISHMENT CREDIT ACCOUNT CREATION FORM, proposing to send a monthly bill to his non-existent address, or non-existent email.
  - admax88q 7y ago
    Sure your one proposed hyperbolic alternative is significantly worse than cash. That doesn't mean that there doesn't exist an alternative that is better or not significantly worse than cash.
  - pingyong 7y ago
    Maybe there should always be a way to open a bank account, even without a home address? If you don't have a bank account, you get excluded from a lot of options that might solve your homelessness anyway. It seems to me that being able to open a bank account should be a fundamental right of some sort.
    - Frost1x 7y ago
      There are lots of catches like this that make life difficult to the poor and vulnerable in our modern society. Most of these catches are some status obtained and managed through privatized means with little-to-no oversight that are becoming more and more fundamental functions of daily life as they are abstract processes to follow leading to obtaining necessities: food, housing, healthcare, etc. The vast majority are never exposed to these institutional barriers because they are financially above those barriers but for working poor, poverty stricken, etc. these are daily challenges to deal with with little or no recourse of action. Take paying utilities as an example. For most it's as trivial as logging on your phone one time and setting up the account with auto recurring payments on a credit card--then setup auto payment of your credit card from a checking account where you have some portion of income automatically transferred to. For others, they have to carefully pick and choose when and what to pay and make sure they can pay cash, check, etc. There's all the additional overhead too: traveling to a valid payment location or the post office for stamps to mail things in, cognative load/stress for keeping track of the schedule or putting it down on a calendar, etc. That's just paying utilities. Plenty of other processes have all sorts of other headaches. In most locations in modern society, owning and maintaining a vehicle is a necessity when factoring all alternatives (aside from moving), yet vehicle ownership considered a privilege. This list goes on and on. It's no wonder many Americans are not happy.
jypepin 7y ago
Cashless stores is something we see a lot in Amsterdam. I always thought that they probably loose a lot of clients, both because of lack of cash and also because they only accept the "pin" card which is, afaik, a Netherlands-only type of debit card. But at the same time it's also probably safer and less management with accounting done automatically.
- Slartie 7y ago
  I've been in Amsterdam twice last year, and I was able to pay everywhere with Apple Pay backed by a Visa card (well, almost anywhere, one store required a physical card, and I am not 100% sure Visa would have worked because I used a Maestro debit card there). So apparently most merchants don't limit it anymore - would not make much sense anyway since the EU mandated credit card interchange fees to be below 0,3%. That basically made supporting credit cards almost as cheap as the national payment schemes.
  - jypepin 7y ago
    I live in Amsterdam and can attest a lot of store only accept the dutch pin card
- hocuspocus 7y ago
  According to Wikipedia, the PIN domestic payment network was discontinued in 2012 in favor of Maestro and V-pay debit cards. The main problem with this is that many countries, even within the EU, don't really issue Maestro and V-pay cards, but rather proper MasterCard and Visa (debit) cards. In my experience it wasn't an issue in Amsterdam. In Brussels on the other hand, I came across a couple places where I could only use my Maestro card. That said, the unbanked/underbanked population is probably a lot smaller than in the US.
  - jypepin 7y ago
    Those pin card are Maestro "compatible" I guess. The card works where Maestro is accepted, but not all Maestro cards work on those PIN systems. source: I live in Amsterdam and have a Pin card, a US debit Mastercard, a US Credit Mastercard, a dutch debut maestro and a dutch credit mastercard. Only the pin works on those PIN systems
xfitm3 7y ago
Cash is legal tender and should be required to be accepted at all businesses. Electronic payments have overhead, too, so I don't accept that as an argument. Electronic payments are a privacy concern for me. It's a big data collection source and it fuels companies like Axciom who built extremely detailed consumer dossiers on everyone. Health insurance premiums tied to purchases? A teenager buying condoms who doesn't want their parents to know? Denied employment because you've purchased nicotine? Not far fetched.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Cash is legal tender and should be required to be accepted at all businesses. They're legal tender for debts. If they don't want to sell you something because you can't agree mutually acceptable payment terms then there is no debt.
  - cjg 7y ago
    I think the person you are replying to meant "should" in the sense of "I want things to be a certain way" rather than "I think it is true that".
gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
Honestly this seems like progressive posturing that's all too eager to pass prohibitions than actually address the root of issues they're concerned about.
ken 7y ago
I admire the effort. Being poor is expensive. I'd love to see big-picture legislation (like GDPR is for privacy) which could take a bite out of all the tiny cuts of financial mini-hardship that poor people face every day. I just have no idea what it'd look like. Maybe there's nothing better we can do than 100 little laws like this one. I encourage everyone to try living one day like they're down to their last $20 and have to buy some things they need (pretend you don't have a wallet full of plastic cards and a phone full of passwords). Nearly every time you go to buy something, you'll encounter a situation where you could save money in the long run if only you had a little more to spend today.

34 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

Kaibeezy 7y ago

Grande skinny matcha latte, please. $8.75? I’ve got a musket ball and this shiny bead, will that cover it?

fenk85 7y ago
Why the sarcasm? Here in Ireland a major bank was down for several days because contractor of bank located in India screwed up a production deployment or something, resulting in hundreds of thousands of transactions having to be manually reconciled. In that time people had no access to their money, no tap and pay, chip and pin etc, nothing. That was quite a lesson in importance of cash, another lesson was about a dozen years ago when all the banks here went to the wall and had to be nationalised in order prevent bank runs.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  OP thinks only luddites use cash. PS OP, in the 1700s you'd probably issue a writ of payment and the shopkeeper would add the purchase to your tab, which you'd pay off in full at a later date. Unless you were a total stranger to that establishment, then you'd probably be paying at the time of purchase. Let's get our jokes historical accurate.
  - Kaibeezy 7y ago
    1640 and, yes, a total stranger, to be precise. I leveraged someone else's research.
- Kaibeezy 7y ago
  Sarcasm, nah, just ordinary common-or-garden comedy. Also a literary reference. Anyone? All seriousness aside, if a business wants to be cashless, that’s a business decision, not religion. If the system goes down, they can dogmatically refuse to function, or they can place a large can on the counter and get on with it.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Ireland famously survived a six month lock out by nearly every bank in the seventies, with no harm to the economy. Pubs were local guides to credit worthiness, larger shops cashed cheques so businesses could pay staff (an era when many were still paid in cash), so cash could go round the system again, and cheques were countersigned and passed on dozens and dozens of times -- effectively becoming variable size bank notes. It's a fascinating story, and quite remarkable how little effect no banking had.
  - frereubu 7y ago
    I'd never heard of this - fascinating. For others who are interested, there's a decent, referenced, account from the Bank of England's blog here: https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/01/20/the-cheque-republic-money-in-a-modern-economy-with-no-banks/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/01/20/the-cheque-republic... Doesn't sound like there was "no harm to the economy" though, except in the broader sense. A quote from an Irish building contractor cited in the article: "I employ only 10 people. If it hadn’t been for the bank strike I’d be hiring 30. I’d say I’ve lost up to £20,000 over it ... One of my problems is finding the money to pay the wages. I run round from Wednesday to Friday to scrape them up, and in that time I can do no other work."
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Oh sure, I've no doubt there were individuals and some businesses quite badly affected, but look back at the overall growth, national and regional statistics and the periods with strikes or lock-outs are simply undetectable if not highlighted for you. Sales and growth figures weren't noticeably harmed. No doubt if you were new to an area, didn't yet have a local or just weren't a pub goer, you might have had more trouble than most. The article also notes the steady stream of people going down to the local department store and other larger shops once a week, to cash their wages, or a wages cheque to pay their factory workers. Pubs were accumulating cashed cheques from regulars and some making smaller loans. The real surprise for me is how smoothly they coped, and how little fall out there seemed to be when banks reopened. Though of course there were some of the millions of cheques doing the rounds that did bounce. I've seen far less about knock on effects after reopening like that, but it's usually described in a way that makes it seem "far less than you would expect".
- whb07 7y ago
  Just means you need a better banking institution. By the way this highlights the need for something like Bitcoin.

huffmsa 7y ago

Funny isn't it how these stores don't close when their POS system goes down but are more than happy to take cash.

chrisseaton 7y ago
Why's that funny? It's not like it exposes some hypocrisy or moral duplicity. They'd rather not accept cash because it's bulky, dirty, slow, and expensive to handle. But if they can't accept anything else for a large number of customers for some reason they will go back to it.
- Slartie 7y ago
  It is hypocrisy to a certain extent. Cash only works because people accept it. It depends upon enough people accepting it, because only then enough of physical cash will circulate in order to make maintaining all the infrastructure (printing it, putting ATMs up, offering cash handling for merchants etc.) cost-effective enough for it to be done. If suddenly 95% of cash acceptance was dropped, a lot of that infrastructure will vanish, forcing the remaining 5% to drop cash acceptance as well...a death spiral, ultimately ending with the elimination of cash and thus also the elimination of the very fallback that these stores mentioned by the OP relied upon. Consider the cost of accepting cash an insurance premium against technical failures in the electronic payment networks and your POS systems.

jedimastert 7y ago

> Businesses that still want cashless transactions can provide a machine that exchanges cash for a gift card, but must accept cash if the machine breaks down, according to the new law. This would be a huge issue to me. I will admit that I don't live in NYC, but if I was to travel there on business and a random restaurant made me trade in $20 for a gift card to pay for a $8 meal in a place that I will probably never go back to, that's $12 out of my pocket that I paid in "cash is inconvenient" tax to that restaurant. Even worse, if I go to a store all the time (e.g. it's the only grocery store within walking distance and I don't have a car) but I'm underbanked, then I have to continually keep money in their "bank". > "Your total comes out to $20 but you only have $8 in store-bucks! Don't have exactly $12 in cash? That's a shame. I guess you'll have to come back to spend the rest!" Later you find out that the gift cards expire. Oops.

seibelj 7y ago
That decision is up to the restaurant. They could also just accept cash, if people like you stop frequenting their businesses.
- ken 7y ago
  Are they required to tell you? I've been to more than one restaurant that said "sorry, we don't take cash" when there was no signage to inform me of this fact.
jon889 7y ago
Can't you just use card?
diebeforei485 7y ago
In NYC you could walk into a CVS or DuaneReade and use cash to purchase a prepaid Visa card that works anywhere Visa cards are accepted.
- codazoda 7y ago
  Where I live these cards are expensive. For example, I considered buying one for a $60 a year service. The card itself costs just $1, but there is a $6.95 per month fee. So it costs me $7.95, minimum, to use one of these (13%). There are also fees for reloading the cards without EFT. If you keep the card all year it costs $83.40.

miggol 7y ago

As someone who in the past year has only used cash to pay for illicit substances, I was quite surprised by the title. Why punish business owners for choosing a more efficient and safe payment method? But having read the article, well, I see it differently. I did not know that cash still played such an indispensable role in the lives of many vulnerable groups in the U.S.. Does anyone have more info on what is meant by "alternative financial services"? I'm guessing they're not referring to bitcoin...

Izkata 7y ago
> I did not know that cash still played such an indispensable role in the lives of many vulnerable groups in the U.S.. I'm not even close to "a vulnerable group", but I still use cash for convenience. It's faster than card, most places don't have phone-based payments (I don't use them anyway, never felt worthwhile), and I don't clutter up my bank statements with daily purchases (lunch, groceries, etc).

diebeforei485 7y ago

All this concern about the unbanked/underbanked could be more effectively channeled into making banking more accessible IMO. As an example, the city could provide a free reloadable prepaid card to people who qualify as underbanked (based on some combination of income and residential address). Does this bill mean car dealerships (more popular in the outer boroughs than most people think) and jewelry shops will no longer be able to refuse briefcases full of cash as payment?

jacques_chester 7y ago
NYC's ability to place pressure on retailers in NYC is higher than its ability to place pressure on national and international banks.
cesarb 7y ago
> As an example, the city could provide a free reloadable prepaid card to people who qualify as underbanked (based on some combination of income and residential address). Then you still have the people who are underbanked for some reason but don't qualify as underbanked under that criteria. The only reliable way to do it would be to provide it to everyone, no questions asked (you can't even require proof of identity or residence, otherwise you'd still have the homeless people who lost their documents and can't get new ones). In the end, that reloadable prepaid card becomes a more complicated, less reliable form of physical cash.
- jedieaston 7y ago
  Hasn’t this already been resolved in NYC by the MetroCard? (Which is going away in a few years, last I heard, but it’s a prepaid card that everyone has access to.)
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  And this will never exist because of money laundering and KYC. Cash is just easier.
farrisbris 7y ago
Its not all about cash vs non-cash. It can also be about privacy. You might not want some embarrasing item on your bank statement for a number of reasons. I would love a reloadable prepaid anonymous card i could use instead of my own in my everyday life. I would probably use only that if i could find one. There is no such option afaik where i live though. And we are transitioning very fast to cashless. ( Norway )

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

I find this highly surprising (in a good way). NYC is home to an industry that stands to benefit from a cashless economy and home to a government that never seems to turn down an increase in their ability to put people under a metaphorical microscope. I would have predicted they would be one of the first places to ban cash and one of the last to mandate businesses accept cash. I'm really happy to see consumer protection winning out over private interest for money and state interest for power but damn is that a curve ball in this day and age.

ada1981 7y ago

The opportunity might be for generic in store cash -> debit card machines that can be used anywhere.

ada1981 7y ago
Unless the law says you can’t charge a fee for the debit cards...

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

Couldn’t this be effectively curtailed by requiring exact change only?

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chrisseaton 7y ago

Quirky related trivia point when talking about legal tender - Scottish bank notes aren't legal tender, either in Scotland or anywhere else!

mikece 7y ago

From the Federal Reserve website: Q. Is it legal for a business in the United States to refuse cash as a form of payment? A. Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise. Link: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

chrisseaton 7y ago
Is a transaction yet to occur, or that can be cancelled easily when posted terms aren't met, really a 'debt' in the legal sense, though?
- Slartie 7y ago
  This is probably the loophole by which both statements "cash is legal tender for all debts" and "not accepting cash is legal" can coexist. There is no debt if the transaction does not happen because one of the participants is unwilling to enter it for some reason (with the reason being that the other person does want to pay cash). Banning specific reasons for not making business is possible however (it is done to protect ethnic minorities for example), so the situation can probably easily be changed by legislation that bans "wants to pay in cash" as a legit reason for not entering into a transaction at stores that are open to the general public.
Frost1x 7y ago
I read through this statute at some point awhile back. To my understanding, one way businesses get around this is by charging money before the product/service first--essentially putting themselves in "debt" first. By not providing the product/service until you pay, you aren't arguably in any potential form of debt and a business can dictate the form of payment they want. If you pay after receiving a service, then you could loosely be considered in debt. Usually, that doesn't hold enough water from what I read and it really means, until you go to court and have an established debt, you're forced to pay through whatever mechanisms were agreed to in the transaction. Only then does it have to be payable by cash. It's interesting to me because the transactions you're most likely to have cash on hand and pay for are items most would never have to go in debt for (a coffee, lunch, etc.) whereas large transactions you may need to go in debt for ideally use some other non-cash medium (loan, cashiers check, etc.). Basically makes cash useless (why I rarely carry more than say $50 anymore). More interestingly, you'll see businesses adapt quickly to accept cash when their electronic payment/management system goes down for a day. They're incredibly resourceful when it's convenient for themselves. I've had this happen at a coffee shop that was cashless that suddenly decided they'd accept cash when the other option was to not make money.

abalos 7y ago

This strikes me as ridiculous and heavy-handed. We should focus on finding a way to provide vulnerable groups a way to pay at cashless stores rather than increasing the overhead of operating a business (accepting cash, maintaining change, coordinating bank deposits, etc.). Many of these places are coffee shops where their entire ledger is automated. How can we complain that small businesses are closing in NYC and then continue to add regulations which may make it harder for them to operate? That seems like an oxymoron.

mech1234 7y ago
The vulnerable are often underbanked. They might not have a bank account, debit or credit card, or smartphone with Venmo/Cash app/(whatever app is popular today). Cash is the easiest way to help vulnerable groups. If a homeless person wants to buy a cheeseburger, its better to accept the cash rather than have him fill out FORM NY-892-F INDIVIDUAL RETAIL ESTABLISHMENT CREDIT ACCOUNT CREATION FORM, proposing to send a monthly bill to his non-existent address, or non-existent email.
- admax88q 7y ago
  Sure your one proposed hyperbolic alternative is significantly worse than cash. That doesn't mean that there doesn't exist an alternative that is better or not significantly worse than cash.
- pingyong 7y ago
  Maybe there should always be a way to open a bank account, even without a home address? If you don't have a bank account, you get excluded from a lot of options that might solve your homelessness anyway. It seems to me that being able to open a bank account should be a fundamental right of some sort.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    There are lots of catches like this that make life difficult to the poor and vulnerable in our modern society. Most of these catches are some status obtained and managed through privatized means with little-to-no oversight that are becoming more and more fundamental functions of daily life as they are abstract processes to follow leading to obtaining necessities: food, housing, healthcare, etc. The vast majority are never exposed to these institutional barriers because they are financially above those barriers but for working poor, poverty stricken, etc. these are daily challenges to deal with with little or no recourse of action. Take paying utilities as an example. For most it's as trivial as logging on your phone one time and setting up the account with auto recurring payments on a credit card--then setup auto payment of your credit card from a checking account where you have some portion of income automatically transferred to. For others, they have to carefully pick and choose when and what to pay and make sure they can pay cash, check, etc. There's all the additional overhead too: traveling to a valid payment location or the post office for stamps to mail things in, cognative load/stress for keeping track of the schedule or putting it down on a calendar, etc. That's just paying utilities. Plenty of other processes have all sorts of other headaches. In most locations in modern society, owning and maintaining a vehicle is a necessity when factoring all alternatives (aside from moving), yet vehicle ownership considered a privilege. This list goes on and on. It's no wonder many Americans are not happy.

jypepin 7y ago

Cashless stores is something we see a lot in Amsterdam. I always thought that they probably loose a lot of clients, both because of lack of cash and also because they only accept the "pin" card which is, afaik, a Netherlands-only type of debit card. But at the same time it's also probably safer and less management with accounting done automatically.

Slartie 7y ago
I've been in Amsterdam twice last year, and I was able to pay everywhere with Apple Pay backed by a Visa card (well, almost anywhere, one store required a physical card, and I am not 100% sure Visa would have worked because I used a Maestro debit card there). So apparently most merchants don't limit it anymore - would not make much sense anyway since the EU mandated credit card interchange fees to be below 0,3%. That basically made supporting credit cards almost as cheap as the national payment schemes.
- jypepin 7y ago
  I live in Amsterdam and can attest a lot of store only accept the dutch pin card
hocuspocus 7y ago
According to Wikipedia, the PIN domestic payment network was discontinued in 2012 in favor of Maestro and V-pay debit cards. The main problem with this is that many countries, even within the EU, don't really issue Maestro and V-pay cards, but rather proper MasterCard and Visa (debit) cards. In my experience it wasn't an issue in Amsterdam. In Brussels on the other hand, I came across a couple places where I could only use my Maestro card. That said, the unbanked/underbanked population is probably a lot smaller than in the US.
- jypepin 7y ago
  Those pin card are Maestro "compatible" I guess. The card works where Maestro is accepted, but not all Maestro cards work on those PIN systems. source: I live in Amsterdam and have a Pin card, a US debit Mastercard, a US Credit Mastercard, a dutch debut maestro and a dutch credit mastercard. Only the pin works on those PIN systems

xfitm3 7y ago

Cash is legal tender and should be required to be accepted at all businesses. Electronic payments have overhead, too, so I don't accept that as an argument. Electronic payments are a privacy concern for me. It's a big data collection source and it fuels companies like Axciom who built extremely detailed consumer dossiers on everyone. Health insurance premiums tied to purchases? A teenager buying condoms who doesn't want their parents to know? Denied employment because you've purchased nicotine? Not far fetched.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> Cash is legal tender and should be required to be accepted at all businesses. They're legal tender for debts. If they don't want to sell you something because you can't agree mutually acceptable payment terms then there is no debt.
- cjg 7y ago
  I think the person you are replying to meant "should" in the sense of "I want things to be a certain way" rather than "I think it is true that".

gnusty_gnurc 7y ago

Honestly this seems like progressive posturing that's all too eager to pass prohibitions than actually address the root of issues they're concerned about.

ken 7y ago

I admire the effort. Being poor is expensive. I'd love to see big-picture legislation (like GDPR is for privacy) which could take a bite out of all the tiny cuts of financial mini-hardship that poor people face every day. I just have no idea what it'd look like. Maybe there's nothing better we can do than 100 little laws like this one. I encourage everyone to try living one day like they're down to their last $20 and have to buy some things they need (pretend you don't have a wallet full of plastic cards and a phone full of passwords). Nearly every time you go to buy something, you'll encounter a situation where you could save money in the long run if only you had a little more to spend today.