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I'm Swiss and try to be as cashless as possible but I can absolutely understand people & businesses opposing a completely cashless future under the assumption t

I'm Swiss and try to be as cashless as possible but I can absolutely understand people & businesses opposing a completely cashless future under the assumption that the current situation remains. The fees associated with the current system are exorbitant. Credit cards, as expected, have a pretty high fee of like 2.5% or more for the accepting business and the new Visa/Mastercard debit cards that they force on everyone have even more egregious fees of CHF 0.5 to 0.95 + 1.5% per transaction. Twint (our digital payment app) also has ~1.5% in fees per transaction and the business case of Twint is to farm as much payment data of the customers as possible for analysis and offers/ads. I do like the convenience of cashless but the cost in fees for businesses and the increased interest in exploiting my transaction history for an ads business sours this a bit for me.

ignormies 4y ago
Of course there are other reasons to avoid a purely cash-free society, but couldn't the Swiss government just limit the transaction rates/fees like the the EU? > caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards; https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-card-based-payments.html https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...
- mantas 4y ago
  Then banks just charge stupidly high card-reader and merchant account fees. It still sucks for small businesses in EU.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Sumup charges 39€ once per terminal, .9% for debit card transactions and 1.9% for credit card transactions. Nothing more. The times when accepting card payments was expensive have been over for years. Everyone whining about "card payments cost so much" should look what the combination of pricing caps and competition have brought up, especially with the pandemic. [1] https://help.sumup.com/de-DE/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3-pricing-fees https://help.sumup.com/de-DE/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3...
    - traspler 4y ago
      Seems to be a bit more in Switzerland: https://www.sumup.com/de-ch/ec-kartleser-kosten/ https://www.sumup.com/de-ch/ec-kartleser-kosten/
    - mantas 4y ago
      It's still an expense to avoid for small businesses. Especially those who do relatively few transactions.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        To the contrary, small businesses can save costs by going at least partially cashless. Cash costs money in itself on a variety of factors - employee theft, employee mistakes (e.g. handing too much change, accepting counterfeit cash), robberies, counting and transporting the cash to a bank, securing the cash on-premises, lost business by people not carrying wads of cash any more...
        mantas 4y ago
        Many small businesses are +/- one-man-operations. Robberies are not a problem in many parts of a world (last local robbing I hard about was 25-ish years ago). Customer retention is not a problem if people are used to cash. Transporting and keeping cash is still a thing if you accept cash. Accepting cash and cards is just doubling costs and logistical issues.
        orwin 4y ago
        The issue for one man business is accounting. You have exceptions in some places (farmer's market) you can basically do as you wish, but in small shops you have to follow rules that makes cashless less painful. In France at least.
        mantas 4y ago
        Modern cashier's machines do accounting pretty well. But looking at businesses I visit - old good pen&paper seem to work great as well.
  - yxhuvud 4y ago
    That still sounds like a situation where the merchants could shop around and where a functioning market could be created. That is a lot harder with the transaction fees as merchants typically don't charge different prices to customers with different cards.
- traspler 4y ago
  Yes there are other reasons, you lose a lot of control, but there are other comments here already discussing that. Yes there needs to be such mandates to limit this but it's difficult to anticipate if/when this would happen. There was such a limit for the older Maestro cards ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) ) (afaik, but I'm not an expert in this domain). I think there the limit was CHF 0.3 per transaction. But you couldn't use them in online shopping or Apple Pay. The new debit cards can be used for that.
  - mrsuprawsm 4y ago
    Maestro debit cards are common in NL and you can use them with Apple Pay. (Online shopping is a bit different, instead of Maestro cards we use an NL-specific system called iDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL, basically direct bank transfers)
trinovantes 4y ago
Processing cash also has non-zero cost (labor to count, secure, transport) but I guess it's still slightly cheaper than digital In addition, businesses that handle most transactions in cash, at least here in Canada, are notorious for tax evasion That being said, I'm not a fan of payment data being sold to ad companies
- bombolo 4y ago
  In reality the digital should cost much much less. They just like having a lot of profit.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Sure, no digital system ever needs maintenance, hardware, or upgrades of any kind.
    - wholinator2 4y ago
      Well if it costs more why are we doing it in the first place? It was my understanding that online payment processing was orders of magnitude cheaper/faster/easier per transaction. Updates and infrastructure require a centralized system to maintain but in the case of tap chip cards, you basically reduce transaction time and effort to 0. This isn't just about small mom and pops either, but huge city walmarts and grocery stores who never have a moment of downtime, the amount of productivity gain from having instant easy payment allows those business to service drastically faster and higher significantly less staff, producing what across the world is probably ridiculous profit. I understand they cost money but how much is the question. I agree some kind of fee system but a dollar + some percent on every transaction? Looking back at my credit card history that would be an insane amount of money, thousands and thousands of dollars over the years that I've paid directly to the card processor. And they need millions of people doing that just to be able to run a complex aws system? On top of ad revenue as well? Some fees are okay but that sounds like way too much.
      - throwaway4aday 4y ago
nhchris 4y ago
It's more than just fees and surveillance. It means you need permission for each transaction. Permission to buy a loaf of bread, a taxi ride, a train ticket. And even Canada does things such as freeze protester's bank accounts without trial. Let's not make it that easy for them, shall we?
- traspler 4y ago
  Absolutely. Other comments here already discuss that. But I think there is discussion to be had about how cash enables certain crimes and what impact that has on us, how cashless can change this and on the other hand how handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government and what risks are associated with that and what mitigations are possible. Also the state already has many, many ways to make your life hell. How big the impact of this additional way is, also needs to be discussed. I'm pretty sure most people don't store their life savings in cash at home and freezing your bank account has a similar impact now even though cash is still available.
  - esperent 4y ago
    > cash enables certain crimes Vs > handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government Seems like the second one enables the crime of disenfranchisement, except that no one will be able to label it a crime and no one will ever be punished because it's the government doing it. See the recent example of the Canadian government cutting off protesters bank access without trial. Whatever you think of the protests, that's a terrible thing for a government to be able to do. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-protest-finances.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
  - irthomasthomas 4y ago
    People will just barter if they want the drugs bad enough. This only adds one step to the purchase.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Black markets are notorious for dealing in foreign currencies or exchanging goods or other convertible assets. Removing cash from the equation has never stopped criminals from operating, see prisons, hyperinflation, wartime, etc. People just invent or adopt a new currency if you take away the current one.
durnygbur 4y ago
It's more a problem why European countries gave up to American Visa/Mastercard duopoly for cards, where the alternative is... Google Pay/Apple Pay duopoly for mobile. Their only answer are miserable local debit/ATM card systems working only in individual European countries, or superfrauds like Wirecard.
- zirgs 4y ago
  You don't need Google Pay to pay with a phone. I use my bank's app for that. It works just fine without Google Pay.
  - durnygbur 4y ago
    Can you pay with your bank's app in a neighbour country? Does it simply boil down to a virtual Visa/Mastercard card?
    - zirgs 4y ago
      Haven't tried it in neighbouring countries yet, but as I understand - it's a virtual Visa/Mastercard card, yeah. So it should be accepted in the same places where my physical card is accepted.
      - durnygbur 4y ago
        So yeah it's the duopoly from my previous comment. When you buy a bloody apple in your nearby shop and pay with it, Americans are salivating.
throw101010 4y ago
I'm Swiss too, and while the fee argument is a great one, my main concern is preserving the optional privacy you have when transacting with cash. It's one of the last aspect of your daily transactions that businesses and most importantly governments cannot trivially track and tie to your identity, aggregate, and potentially use against you (and people who consume like you) in various ways. Giving up this power, out of convenience, is a bad deal for citizens. And before anyone argues that this privacy is used by criminal/terrorists/etc., I would need to be convinced that going fully cashless would stop them to even consider it in the balance... but as far as I can tell they happily use the banking system for their criminal dealings, with the support of banks, since each year there are scandals about banks helping money laundering to the tune of hundreds of millions, even billions at the time, I don't think it happens mostly thanks to cash.
elforce002 4y ago
Not just bad for businesses my friend. I like to use Credit Cards as much as anyone else but the Idea of a cashless society is just bad, to say the least.
seydor 4y ago
On the other hand, the need for non-visa-sanctioned electronic transactions is real. If a society does go cashless, the majority will be finally convinced to end their duopoly and mandate other ways to transact, because having 2 companies mandating whether porn is an tradeable good is tyranny. And yes, crypto is the current option. At least it could work for small transactions.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
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ignormies 4y ago

Of course there are other reasons to avoid a purely cash-free society, but couldn't the Swiss government just limit the transaction rates/fees like the the EU? > caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards; https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-card-based-payments.html https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...

mantas 4y ago
Then banks just charge stupidly high card-reader and merchant account fees. It still sucks for small businesses in EU.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Sumup charges 39€ once per terminal, .9% for debit card transactions and 1.9% for credit card transactions. Nothing more. The times when accepting card payments was expensive have been over for years. Everyone whining about "card payments cost so much" should look what the combination of pricing caps and competition have brought up, especially with the pandemic. [1] https://help.sumup.com/de-DE/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3-pricing-fees https://help.sumup.com/de-DE/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3...
  - traspler 4y ago
    Seems to be a bit more in Switzerland: https://www.sumup.com/de-ch/ec-kartleser-kosten/ https://www.sumup.com/de-ch/ec-kartleser-kosten/
  - mantas 4y ago
    It's still an expense to avoid for small businesses. Especially those who do relatively few transactions.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      To the contrary, small businesses can save costs by going at least partially cashless. Cash costs money in itself on a variety of factors - employee theft, employee mistakes (e.g. handing too much change, accepting counterfeit cash), robberies, counting and transporting the cash to a bank, securing the cash on-premises, lost business by people not carrying wads of cash any more...
      - mantas 4y ago
        Many small businesses are +/- one-man-operations. Robberies are not a problem in many parts of a world (last local robbing I hard about was 25-ish years ago). Customer retention is not a problem if people are used to cash. Transporting and keeping cash is still a thing if you accept cash. Accepting cash and cards is just doubling costs and logistical issues.
        orwin 4y ago
        The issue for one man business is accounting. You have exceptions in some places (farmer's market) you can basically do as you wish, but in small shops you have to follow rules that makes cashless less painful. In France at least.
        mantas 4y ago
        Modern cashier's machines do accounting pretty well. But looking at businesses I visit - old good pen&paper seem to work great as well.
- yxhuvud 4y ago
  That still sounds like a situation where the merchants could shop around and where a functioning market could be created. That is a lot harder with the transaction fees as merchants typically don't charge different prices to customers with different cards.
traspler 4y ago
Yes there are other reasons, you lose a lot of control, but there are other comments here already discussing that. Yes there needs to be such mandates to limit this but it's difficult to anticipate if/when this would happen. There was such a limit for the older Maestro cards ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) ) (afaik, but I'm not an expert in this domain). I think there the limit was CHF 0.3 per transaction. But you couldn't use them in online shopping or Apple Pay. The new debit cards can be used for that.
- mrsuprawsm 4y ago
  Maestro debit cards are common in NL and you can use them with Apple Pay. (Online shopping is a bit different, instead of Maestro cards we use an NL-specific system called iDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL, basically direct bank transfers)

trinovantes 4y ago

Processing cash also has non-zero cost (labor to count, secure, transport) but I guess it's still slightly cheaper than digital In addition, businesses that handle most transactions in cash, at least here in Canada, are notorious for tax evasion That being said, I'm not a fan of payment data being sold to ad companies

bombolo 4y ago
In reality the digital should cost much much less. They just like having a lot of profit.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Sure, no digital system ever needs maintenance, hardware, or upgrades of any kind.
  - wholinator2 4y ago
    Well if it costs more why are we doing it in the first place? It was my understanding that online payment processing was orders of magnitude cheaper/faster/easier per transaction. Updates and infrastructure require a centralized system to maintain but in the case of tap chip cards, you basically reduce transaction time and effort to 0. This isn't just about small mom and pops either, but huge city walmarts and grocery stores who never have a moment of downtime, the amount of productivity gain from having instant easy payment allows those business to service drastically faster and higher significantly less staff, producing what across the world is probably ridiculous profit. I understand they cost money but how much is the question. I agree some kind of fee system but a dollar + some percent on every transaction? Looking back at my credit card history that would be an insane amount of money, thousands and thousands of dollars over the years that I've paid directly to the card processor. And they need millions of people doing that just to be able to run a complex aws system? On top of ad revenue as well? Some fees are okay but that sounds like way too much.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago

nhchris 4y ago

It's more than just fees and surveillance. It means you need permission for each transaction. Permission to buy a loaf of bread, a taxi ride, a train ticket. And even Canada does things such as freeze protester's bank accounts without trial. Let's not make it that easy for them, shall we?

traspler 4y ago
Absolutely. Other comments here already discuss that. But I think there is discussion to be had about how cash enables certain crimes and what impact that has on us, how cashless can change this and on the other hand how handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government and what risks are associated with that and what mitigations are possible. Also the state already has many, many ways to make your life hell. How big the impact of this additional way is, also needs to be discussed. I'm pretty sure most people don't store their life savings in cash at home and freezing your bank account has a similar impact now even though cash is still available.
- esperent 4y ago
  > cash enables certain crimes Vs > handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government Seems like the second one enables the crime of disenfranchisement, except that no one will be able to label it a crime and no one will ever be punished because it's the government doing it. See the recent example of the Canadian government cutting off protesters bank access without trial. Whatever you think of the protests, that's a terrible thing for a government to be able to do. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-protest-finances.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  People will just barter if they want the drugs bad enough. This only adds one step to the purchase.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Black markets are notorious for dealing in foreign currencies or exchanging goods or other convertible assets. Removing cash from the equation has never stopped criminals from operating, see prisons, hyperinflation, wartime, etc. People just invent or adopt a new currency if you take away the current one.

durnygbur 4y ago

It's more a problem why European countries gave up to American Visa/Mastercard duopoly for cards, where the alternative is... Google Pay/Apple Pay duopoly for mobile. Their only answer are miserable local debit/ATM card systems working only in individual European countries, or superfrauds like Wirecard.

zirgs 4y ago
You don't need Google Pay to pay with a phone. I use my bank's app for that. It works just fine without Google Pay.
- durnygbur 4y ago
  Can you pay with your bank's app in a neighbour country? Does it simply boil down to a virtual Visa/Mastercard card?
  - zirgs 4y ago
    Haven't tried it in neighbouring countries yet, but as I understand - it's a virtual Visa/Mastercard card, yeah. So it should be accepted in the same places where my physical card is accepted.
    - durnygbur 4y ago
      So yeah it's the duopoly from my previous comment. When you buy a bloody apple in your nearby shop and pay with it, Americans are salivating.

throw101010 4y ago

I'm Swiss too, and while the fee argument is a great one, my main concern is preserving the optional privacy you have when transacting with cash. It's one of the last aspect of your daily transactions that businesses and most importantly governments cannot trivially track and tie to your identity, aggregate, and potentially use against you (and people who consume like you) in various ways. Giving up this power, out of convenience, is a bad deal for citizens. And before anyone argues that this privacy is used by criminal/terrorists/etc., I would need to be convinced that going fully cashless would stop them to even consider it in the balance... but as far as I can tell they happily use the banking system for their criminal dealings, with the support of banks, since each year there are scandals about banks helping money laundering to the tune of hundreds of millions, even billions at the time, I don't think it happens mostly thanks to cash.

elforce002 4y ago

Not just bad for businesses my friend. I like to use Credit Cards as much as anyone else but the Idea of a cashless society is just bad, to say the least.

seydor 4y ago

On the other hand, the need for non-visa-sanctioned electronic transactions is real. If a society does go cashless, the majority will be finally convinced to end their duopoly and mandate other ways to transact, because having 2 companies mandating whether porn is an tradeable good is tyranny. And yes, crypto is the current option. At least it could work for small transactions.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

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