7 ms·

Somewhat of a meta-comment but I’m shocked at how many people are complaining about you not taking cash. Has anyone ever walked out of your coffee shop because

Somewhat of a meta-comment but I’m shocked at how many people are complaining about you not taking cash. 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.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
If a place doesn't accept cash, I leave. Cash is one of our last remaining bastions of freedom. I would gladly pay by card, if those cards were anonymous, refillable with cash. But these do not exist anymore, even for small amounts. They insist they must know your every last $0.50 transaction.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  If a place doesn’t accept credit cards, I leave also. I just don’t carry cash anymore. To each their own. 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.
  - mikhael28 4y ago
    It also costs money to handle cash. You have to count it at the end of the shift. And store it. And transport it to a bank to deposit it, which takes time ($$) and resources (gas, etc)
    - kelnos 4y ago
      I also expect banks charge larger businesses that deal with a lot of cash for the privilege of getting the bank to handle that cash for them.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  I get your point, and I do think it's great for many people that we don't lose this outright, but I will offer an alternative view - Where I live, there always were a lot of people who don't report their income fully, which means they mostly transact in cash. We have fairly high and progressive taxes, which means that by transacting in cash, some medium to high earners can lower their tax payments significantly. After trying basically everything over many decades, the clear plan by to government is to make cash transactions obsolete as soon as possible. They've been slowly reducing the maximum legal cash transaction size for a while now, but the goal is clearly to get rid of cash. 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...
Analemma_ 4y ago
Remember: this is HN, where the bubble effect is strong. On Hacker News, everybody "knows" that Google Search is useless these days and that Amazon results are all counterfeit junk, even though in the real world I have never heard anyone bring this up and these services are still incredibly popular. It's the same thing with cash: I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards.
- blendergeek 4y ago
  > I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards. 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).
  - andirk 4y ago
    A few companies around town here in SF Bay Area started doing cashless and the community saw it as a red flag as it clearly disadvantages certain groups in our community. A couple of those places I frequented took back cashless from said pushback.
    - extra88 4y ago
      According to this [0], it's illegal for retail businesses to not accept cash in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City and the states of Massachusetts and New Jersey. [0] https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/right-pay-cash-now-protected-new-york https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/right-pay-cash-now-protecte...
- nicbou 4y ago
  Remember that this is also an American bubble at times. In Germany, cash is still king. You can't go long without 10€ in your wallet. 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.
Larrikin 4y ago
Cities are making it illegal, as they should. It's not always meant in bad faith, but it's also a form of gentrification that hurts the poor and unbanked by removing yet another service from them. https://www.nssh.com/2020/04/philadelphias-ban-on-cashless-stores-triggers-debate-on-whether-such-bans-stifle-innovation-or-increase-accessibility/ 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.
- 8note 4y ago
  > that didn't allow them to get a bank account 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
  - andirk 4y ago
    OK but it is an issue. How about solve that decades old problem before turning people away and insisting that whatever payment processor take some 2-5% of your purchase. It's a complete digression of technology.
  - xp84 4y ago
    In civilized countries they solved this decades ago by allowing the postal service to offer simple bank accounts. 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.
zbuf 4y ago
> I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything 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.
jacktribe 4y ago
From what I've observed, a tiny fraction have left because of the no-cash policy, probably under 1%. We were expecting 5% to 10% in the first weeks, since customers that walked in for the very first time wouldn't have known of the policy. 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.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Interesting. Cash handling costs are 5% to 15% https://www.ihlservices.com/product/costofcash/ https://www.ihlservices.com/product/costofcash/ This makes going cash free a pretty smart choice.
unethical_ban 4y ago
I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card). 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.
- RulerOf 4y ago
  >I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card). 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.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  In defense of cashless, there is so much you don’t have to worry about as the business owner; yes the credit companies take a somewhat exhorbitant percentage but you don’t have to worry about having thousands of dollars in cash at the end of the day, don’t have to worry about employees skimming or making mistakes like coming in short. It also automates a ton of the accounting. So there are some benefits.
  - ovao 4y ago
    On the other hand, you have to worry about disputes and chargebacks, of which you can only accumulate so many with your processor, and which also tend to have unfavorable outcomes for merchants. The pros may still outweigh the cons, but it’s not all roses with cards.
andirk 4y ago
I prefer paying cash. It is also elitist to not accept cash because it means I need a credit card or an expensive phone, neither of which I have on me while jogging. 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.
- jraph 4y ago
  > I also don't jog, but you get the point 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.
  - andirk 4y ago
    I frequent taco trucks and places that prefer cash and almost no places that don't so I have ~$40 in my gym bag and neither of my 2 heavily used credit cards. 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.
- kelnos 4y ago
  > It is also elitist to not accept cash 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.
odiroot 4y ago
I sometimes did the opposite, when living in Germany. I'm not gonna bother hunting for ATM (and usually pay commission with that) just to have a privilege of spending money at your business.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

If a place doesn't accept cash, I leave. Cash is one of our last remaining bastions of freedom. I would gladly pay by card, if those cards were anonymous, refillable with cash. But these do not exist anymore, even for small amounts. They insist they must know your every last $0.50 transaction.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
If a place doesn’t accept credit cards, I leave also. I just don’t carry cash anymore. To each their own. 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.
- mikhael28 4y ago
  It also costs money to handle cash. You have to count it at the end of the shift. And store it. And transport it to a bank to deposit it, which takes time ($$) and resources (gas, etc)
  - kelnos 4y ago
    I also expect banks charge larger businesses that deal with a lot of cash for the privilege of getting the bank to handle that cash for them.
int0x2e 4y ago
I get your point, and I do think it's great for many people that we don't lose this outright, but I will offer an alternative view - Where I live, there always were a lot of people who don't report their income fully, which means they mostly transact in cash. We have fairly high and progressive taxes, which means that by transacting in cash, some medium to high earners can lower their tax payments significantly. After trying basically everything over many decades, the clear plan by to government is to make cash transactions obsolete as soon as possible. They've been slowly reducing the maximum legal cash transaction size for a while now, but the goal is clearly to get rid of cash. 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...

Analemma_ 4y ago

Remember: this is HN, where the bubble effect is strong. On Hacker News, everybody "knows" that Google Search is useless these days and that Amazon results are all counterfeit junk, even though in the real world I have never heard anyone bring this up and these services are still incredibly popular. It's the same thing with cash: I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards.

blendergeek 4y ago
> I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards. 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).
- andirk 4y ago
  A few companies around town here in SF Bay Area started doing cashless and the community saw it as a red flag as it clearly disadvantages certain groups in our community. A couple of those places I frequented took back cashless from said pushback.
  - extra88 4y ago
    According to this [0], it's illegal for retail businesses to not accept cash in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City and the states of Massachusetts and New Jersey. [0] https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/right-pay-cash-now-protected-new-york https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/right-pay-cash-now-protecte...
nicbou 4y ago
Remember that this is also an American bubble at times. In Germany, cash is still king. You can't go long without 10€ in your wallet. 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.

Larrikin 4y ago

Cities are making it illegal, as they should. It's not always meant in bad faith, but it's also a form of gentrification that hurts the poor and unbanked by removing yet another service from them. https://www.nssh.com/2020/04/philadelphias-ban-on-cashless-stores-triggers-debate-on-whether-such-bans-stifle-innovation-or-increase-accessibility/ 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.

8note 4y ago
> that didn't allow them to get a bank account 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
- andirk 4y ago
  OK but it is an issue. How about solve that decades old problem before turning people away and insisting that whatever payment processor take some 2-5% of your purchase. It's a complete digression of technology.
- xp84 4y ago
  In civilized countries they solved this decades ago by allowing the postal service to offer simple bank accounts. 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.

zbuf 4y ago

> I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything 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.

jacktribe 4y ago

From what I've observed, a tiny fraction have left because of the no-cash policy, probably under 1%. We were expecting 5% to 10% in the first weeks, since customers that walked in for the very first time wouldn't have known of the policy. 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.

renewiltord 4y ago
Interesting. Cash handling costs are 5% to 15% https://www.ihlservices.com/product/costofcash/ https://www.ihlservices.com/product/costofcash/ This makes going cash free a pretty smart choice.

unethical_ban 4y ago

I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card). 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.

RulerOf 4y ago
>I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card). 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.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
In defense of cashless, there is so much you don’t have to worry about as the business owner; yes the credit companies take a somewhat exhorbitant percentage but you don’t have to worry about having thousands of dollars in cash at the end of the day, don’t have to worry about employees skimming or making mistakes like coming in short. It also automates a ton of the accounting. So there are some benefits.
- ovao 4y ago
  On the other hand, you have to worry about disputes and chargebacks, of which you can only accumulate so many with your processor, and which also tend to have unfavorable outcomes for merchants. The pros may still outweigh the cons, but it’s not all roses with cards.

andirk 4y ago

I prefer paying cash. It is also elitist to not accept cash because it means I need a credit card or an expensive phone, neither of which I have on me while jogging. 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.

jraph 4y ago
> I also don't jog, but you get the point 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.
- andirk 4y ago
  I frequent taco trucks and places that prefer cash and almost no places that don't so I have ~$40 in my gym bag and neither of my 2 heavily used credit cards. 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.
kelnos 4y ago
> It is also elitist to not accept cash 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.

odiroot 4y ago

I sometimes did the opposite, when living in Germany. I'm not gonna bother hunting for ATM (and usually pay commission with that) just to have a privilege of spending money at your business.