5 ms·

I agree with some of what the author says. Especially about how cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change. But having worked at a cash re

I agree with some of what the author says. Especially about how cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change. But having worked at a cash register at for a period in my life theres a lot of good reasons businesses do this. Stores dealing in cash need a float at the register. Where I was that was 500 euro. That's 500 euro in coins and lower value notes that has to be at every register so that anyone that pays in cash can be given the correct change. A large store near me has about 20 registers, that during very busy periods could all be open. So to guarantee they can accept cash on a busy day like that means having 10 grand to just park in these registers. That's 10k that's vulnerable to theft either from employees or robbers. Security vans have to be hired to take the days takings to a bank and bring lower denominations to the store to fill these floats. When someone finishes a shift they have to spend time what they have, that doesn't take long but it's another cost for the company. It also means insurance costs are higher. The guy only accepting card payments from his horsebox converted to a coffee shop doesn't worry about any of this. At least where i am *living cash is more expensive than electronic

boomchinolo78 3y ago
Card is a permanent %2+ tax, how does it compare?
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  See my sibling comment, but it is hard to quantify how much cash costs because a lot of the costs are indirect or infrequent capital costs. Things like employee time, and money handling equipment. It will also vary enormously based on the scale and nature of the business. A small coffee shop can get by with a $129 cash drawer hooked up to an iPad and a manager spending a few hours per week counting money and visiting the bank. A large store like Walmart can easily spend $100k+ on all of the equipment for cash handling in addition to having to contract with an armored car company.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    Note that "a few hours per week" for the manager costs perhaps $30/hour total compensation. That's more than the price of that drawer, every week. Over a year, it's perhaps 4 hours/week x $30/hour x 52 weeks/year, which comes to over $6,000. That's real money for a small coffee shop.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash. With digital payments you see exactly how much the payments cost. Swipe fee + processing fee, and it isn't fun as a business owner to see ~3% of your money going to a bank. With cash, it takes some effort to tally the costs. Cash handling equipment: POS, safes, bill counters for larger merchants, etc... Then you have to add the amount of time your employees spend on cash: counting drawers at the start, counting drawers at the end, managers counting money into and out of the safe, managers taking cash to the bank, or hiring a service to do that, cash goes missing through malice and negligence, etc...
- lawlessone 3y ago
  Dealing with it a register was a pain to say the least. You'll constantly have people demanding change in particular notes etc. You often have to watch out for people insisting they handed you a 50 so they can scam you into more change. Or get chewed out by someone for the wrong change when really they just dropped the note on the way back to their car. None of that can happen with a card. The card payments are nearly atomic, you paid or you didn't. In a year doing the work I only once had someone claim a card payment took the wrong amount and it was a very dubious claim. For cash i'd often I'd have to call a manager to request more cash for the float. Because the older customer base would spend their morning queueing outside at an ATM the buy the smallest cheapest thing to get change, which they only needed to pay another businesses that only dealt in cash. It goes without saying my views are biased from dealing with cash paying people.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash. Then powerful trade organizations should lobby for introducing a system of digital payments that offers at least the same level of anonymity as cash.
  - 3y ago
ARandumGuy 3y ago
These are all very good reasons why a business may not want to accept cash. Cash adds a lot of overhead and security risks that can completely negate any savings gained by not having to pay credit card fees. The problem is that if enough businesses stop accepting cash, then it becomes nigh impossible to participate in society if you can only pay in cash. Which can be a big problem in the US, where not everyone has access to credit cards or free checking accounts. This is why I support regulation that requires businesses to accept cash. Yes, it adds overhead. But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.
- cbdumas 3y ago
  An alternative might be regulation ensuring people have access to banking services, either privately or by the government offering these services directly
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    I'm biased here, but a basic electronic income seems like a solution to me.
- ta_vf7xjd34cc 3y ago
  > But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things. Forcing banks and digital wallet providers to provide users a prepaid card/digital balance in exchange for cash is a good alternative. This should be a part of the charter/license under which such organisations operate.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That doesn't address the issue of all the tracking and data collection that comes with using cards, though. That crap is why I prefer to use cash.
ale42 3y ago
All this about the costs of dealing with cash are true. But they're especially true for the big players. I've seen several shops (including small coffee and ice cream places) telling people more or less openly that they prefer cash. Because card companies take a margin on every transaction, and don't allow them to charge more to compensate. Some try to go around the other way (offering e.g. a 5% discount to people paying cash - I had this at a restaurant). The problem is that the big ones can negotiate lower transaction fees with the card companies...
- lawlessone 3y ago
  I suspect some of it's a tax thing as it's a lot harder to hide income when all your transactions are digital. hypocrisy on my part but I have probably benefitted from paying cash for handiwork done that was only cheap because the person might not have paid tax.
  - ale42 3y ago
    If you get paid cash and give a receipt/cash ticket, I'm not sure you can avoid declaring that revenue to the tax authorities. It's enough that one of your customers uses that ticket to deduce it as a professional expense from their own tax declaration to get potentially caught. I was hearing that all the time before card payments were a common thing (i.e. in the '80s, writing from Europe), "didn't get a receipt... they want to avoid taxes"
    - lucubratory 3y ago
      I mean yeah, if you give out a receipt as any sort of tradesman you're probably going to have to report that income or risk tax evasion prosecution. I have personally never had a tradesman give me a receipt, always cash-in-hand, for anything at home. Work expenses a receipt is required though, and those I pay with card anyway.
  - creer 3y ago
    I don't know about that. I mean there are not many places (at least around here) that don't use cash registers. Nothing eliminates fraud but just because it's cash doesn't make it obvious or foolproof. At the same time, we often hear of ludicrous ways to try and beat the tax authority. I'm sure people try often enough.
c22 3y ago
There are huge risks to operating any sort of physical retail establishment, well beyond managing the change in the tills. This doesn't mean the world would be better served if all retail happened online. The risks are worth the rewards.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  >well beyond managing the change in the tills. It's not small change though. Shop lifters are an issue but weight limits the value of what they could steal. The shop doesn't have to pay for an armored truck to deliver the milk, a regular truck works fine because we don't have armed milk robbers.
  - c22 3y ago
    There are risks in physical retail far beyond managing the shoplifting problem as well. In fact, theft of all sorts is only a small portion of the risk-pie here.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change. You could, if there were just more uptake of digital payments by individuals. In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now. There are beggars in parts of sub-Saharan Africa who use the local very developed mobile-payments infrastructure.
- AlanYx 3y ago
  >In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now. This is true -- street beggars in China typically have printed and laminated QR codes to make contributions easier.
- MrRolleyes 3y ago
  This comes with additional complications in the US—for instance, you can be booted off SSI if you have too much income for the month. We functionally have mandatory poverty in this country for folks on disability.
pengaru 3y ago
Here in the US most of the stores with that many cashiers are grocery stores and have become increasingly automated via "self checkout", and they're still perfectly capable of accepting cash - it's like an ATM machine, and far more challenging to rob with a gun. The locale I've most encountered the cashless shift has been Santa Monica, not at the grocery stores with tons of cashiers, but at small restaurants and such where they've embraced cashless and in many cases menu-less as well. It's outright hostile to find yourself socializing there without a phone and just a wad of cash. And it should be made illegal IMNSHO, as these are public spaces operating with a business license discriminating against those without credit cards and/or smartphones. This is private members-only club levels of B.S. Portland is another locale I've been affected by this BTW.
creer 3y ago
The costs are just one side of it. A good reason to accept both cash and cards is that customers like that. No doubt it would be cheaper to stock only one brand of cereals and yet nobody does that.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  If this is the argument, though, then it's a good one to let the market sort out. If customers have a strong enough preference for cash that it outweighs the costs, businesses can figure this out and accept cash. Different stores can have different options in terms of how they handle cash. Costco only has one kind of toilet paper. Target has 10. There are pluses and minuses that they can weigh themselves.
  - creer 3y ago
    It's one argument but yes and no. I was thinking it's one argument for the store that has the OPTION to go cashless and might not - just so as to serve more customers. But the store is not deciding on its own. For example if costs are pushed by outside forces too far one way or the other. Say, if the tax authority makes it hell to accept cash. Well then the store does not really have the option. The decision has been made for them.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Fine, so why they won't let us pay with anonymous cards? All the benefit of cashless without surrendering your privacy roghts. But no, they insist that every card be registered, identity scrupulously verified. Because terrorism, think of the children and what not.

boomchinolo78 3y ago

Card is a permanent %2+ tax, how does it compare?

dghlsakjg 3y ago
See my sibling comment, but it is hard to quantify how much cash costs because a lot of the costs are indirect or infrequent capital costs. Things like employee time, and money handling equipment. It will also vary enormously based on the scale and nature of the business. A small coffee shop can get by with a $129 cash drawer hooked up to an iPad and a manager spending a few hours per week counting money and visiting the bank. A large store like Walmart can easily spend $100k+ on all of the equipment for cash handling in addition to having to contract with an armored car company.
- jfengel 3y ago
  Note that "a few hours per week" for the manager costs perhaps $30/hour total compensation. That's more than the price of that drawer, every week. Over a year, it's perhaps 4 hours/week x $30/hour x 52 weeks/year, which comes to over $6,000. That's real money for a small coffee shop.

dghlsakjg 3y ago

I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash. With digital payments you see exactly how much the payments cost. Swipe fee + processing fee, and it isn't fun as a business owner to see ~3% of your money going to a bank. With cash, it takes some effort to tally the costs. Cash handling equipment: POS, safes, bill counters for larger merchants, etc... Then you have to add the amount of time your employees spend on cash: counting drawers at the start, counting drawers at the end, managers counting money into and out of the safe, managers taking cash to the bank, or hiring a service to do that, cash goes missing through malice and negligence, etc...

lawlessone 3y ago
Dealing with it a register was a pain to say the least. You'll constantly have people demanding change in particular notes etc. You often have to watch out for people insisting they handed you a 50 so they can scam you into more change. Or get chewed out by someone for the wrong change when really they just dropped the note on the way back to their car. None of that can happen with a card. The card payments are nearly atomic, you paid or you didn't. In a year doing the work I only once had someone claim a card payment took the wrong amount and it was a very dubious claim. For cash i'd often I'd have to call a manager to request more cash for the float. Because the older customer base would spend their morning queueing outside at an ATM the buy the smallest cheapest thing to get change, which they only needed to pay another businesses that only dealt in cash. It goes without saying my views are biased from dealing with cash paying people.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash. Then powerful trade organizations should lobby for introducing a system of digital payments that offers at least the same level of anonymity as cash.
- 3y ago

ARandumGuy 3y ago

These are all very good reasons why a business may not want to accept cash. Cash adds a lot of overhead and security risks that can completely negate any savings gained by not having to pay credit card fees. The problem is that if enough businesses stop accepting cash, then it becomes nigh impossible to participate in society if you can only pay in cash. Which can be a big problem in the US, where not everyone has access to credit cards or free checking accounts. This is why I support regulation that requires businesses to accept cash. Yes, it adds overhead. But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.

cbdumas 3y ago
An alternative might be regulation ensuring people have access to banking services, either privately or by the government offering these services directly
- lawlessone 3y ago
  I'm biased here, but a basic electronic income seems like a solution to me.
ta_vf7xjd34cc 3y ago
> But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things. Forcing banks and digital wallet providers to provide users a prepaid card/digital balance in exchange for cash is a good alternative. This should be a part of the charter/license under which such organisations operate.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  That doesn't address the issue of all the tracking and data collection that comes with using cards, though. That crap is why I prefer to use cash.

ale42 3y ago

All this about the costs of dealing with cash are true. But they're especially true for the big players. I've seen several shops (including small coffee and ice cream places) telling people more or less openly that they prefer cash. Because card companies take a margin on every transaction, and don't allow them to charge more to compensate. Some try to go around the other way (offering e.g. a 5% discount to people paying cash - I had this at a restaurant). The problem is that the big ones can negotiate lower transaction fees with the card companies...

lawlessone 3y ago
I suspect some of it's a tax thing as it's a lot harder to hide income when all your transactions are digital. hypocrisy on my part but I have probably benefitted from paying cash for handiwork done that was only cheap because the person might not have paid tax.
- ale42 3y ago
  If you get paid cash and give a receipt/cash ticket, I'm not sure you can avoid declaring that revenue to the tax authorities. It's enough that one of your customers uses that ticket to deduce it as a professional expense from their own tax declaration to get potentially caught. I was hearing that all the time before card payments were a common thing (i.e. in the '80s, writing from Europe), "didn't get a receipt... they want to avoid taxes"
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    I mean yeah, if you give out a receipt as any sort of tradesman you're probably going to have to report that income or risk tax evasion prosecution. I have personally never had a tradesman give me a receipt, always cash-in-hand, for anything at home. Work expenses a receipt is required though, and those I pay with card anyway.
- creer 3y ago
  I don't know about that. I mean there are not many places (at least around here) that don't use cash registers. Nothing eliminates fraud but just because it's cash doesn't make it obvious or foolproof. At the same time, we often hear of ludicrous ways to try and beat the tax authority. I'm sure people try often enough.

c22 3y ago

There are huge risks to operating any sort of physical retail establishment, well beyond managing the change in the tills. This doesn't mean the world would be better served if all retail happened online. The risks are worth the rewards.

lawlessone 3y ago
>well beyond managing the change in the tills. It's not small change though. Shop lifters are an issue but weight limits the value of what they could steal. The shop doesn't have to pay for an armored truck to deliver the milk, a regular truck works fine because we don't have armed milk robbers.
- c22 3y ago
  There are risks in physical retail far beyond managing the shoplifting problem as well. In fact, theft of all sorts is only a small portion of the risk-pie here.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

> cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change. You could, if there were just more uptake of digital payments by individuals. In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now. There are beggars in parts of sub-Saharan Africa who use the local very developed mobile-payments infrastructure.

AlanYx 3y ago
>In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now. This is true -- street beggars in China typically have printed and laminated QR codes to make contributions easier.
MrRolleyes 3y ago
This comes with additional complications in the US—for instance, you can be booted off SSI if you have too much income for the month. We functionally have mandatory poverty in this country for folks on disability.

pengaru 3y ago

Here in the US most of the stores with that many cashiers are grocery stores and have become increasingly automated via "self checkout", and they're still perfectly capable of accepting cash - it's like an ATM machine, and far more challenging to rob with a gun. The locale I've most encountered the cashless shift has been Santa Monica, not at the grocery stores with tons of cashiers, but at small restaurants and such where they've embraced cashless and in many cases menu-less as well. It's outright hostile to find yourself socializing there without a phone and just a wad of cash. And it should be made illegal IMNSHO, as these are public spaces operating with a business license discriminating against those without credit cards and/or smartphones. This is private members-only club levels of B.S. Portland is another locale I've been affected by this BTW.

creer 3y ago

The costs are just one side of it. A good reason to accept both cash and cards is that customers like that. No doubt it would be cheaper to stock only one brand of cereals and yet nobody does that.

idopmstuff 3y ago
If this is the argument, though, then it's a good one to let the market sort out. If customers have a strong enough preference for cash that it outweighs the costs, businesses can figure this out and accept cash. Different stores can have different options in terms of how they handle cash. Costco only has one kind of toilet paper. Target has 10. There are pluses and minuses that they can weigh themselves.
- creer 3y ago
  It's one argument but yes and no. I was thinking it's one argument for the store that has the OPTION to go cashless and might not - just so as to serve more customers. But the store is not deciding on its own. For example if costs are pushed by outside forces too far one way or the other. Say, if the tax authority makes it hell to accept cash. Well then the store does not really have the option. The decision has been made for them.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Fine, so why they won't let us pay with anonymous cards? All the benefit of cashless without surrendering your privacy roghts. But no, they insist that every card be registered, identity scrupulously verified. Because terrorism, think of the children and what not.