40 ms·

The business of check cashing

215 points by admp 3y ago

martinky24 3y ago
Patrick's stuff is so good. I find myself rereading his old posts when I'm bored, just to pick up on details I didn't remember from the first time I read it.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  He's kind of wordy, and comes off as a bit self-important, but yeah I do read most of his stuff.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Wordy? Self-important? That’s a lot of writing online these days.
ggm 3y ago
... in america. It has always confused me how simultaneously the US money system is operating in the most advanced interconnected economy imaginable which fosters innovation (bankruptcy laws in the US are designed to make it easy to try again, they encourage entrepreneurship) and yet.. the whole credit union, banking crash, over inflated economy has made them retain unbelievably archaic approaches to money on paper. Checking for forgery, active forgery presumably underway, 3+ day clearing, "you're not from round here" risks, It's just insane. Go to walmart, buy a stored value card, you can do dollar events with zero friction but present a cheque at the counter, and you're in the slow path. It's positively ... Indian. It's like mainstream Indian bureaucracy levels of insane slowness. It's even had films with Whoopi Goldberg made about it (she is a cheque processor in some movie, doing it by hand at a 1970s vintage cheque processing machine. I think its "made in america" with Ted Danson)
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  So, there is a flywheel coming up to speed: FedNow [1]. I beat this horse to death here [2], but only because it is so revolutionary (for US financial infra). It catches us up with 54 other nation states with instant payment systems. It removes credit risk from delayed settlement, checks (and the risk that goes along with paper instruments), the need for a deposit account to underwrite you (if they simply disable any ability to go below $0). It's run by the Fed as a cost recovery utility, not a for profit enterprise to squeeze as much profit from as possible. There are already 400 participants who have signed on in less than a year of the network being live [3] (the list includes Chase Bank and the US Treasury), and the CFPB is already getting in front of financial institutions attempting to charge insufficient funds fees for instant payments when unnecessary [4]. There are substantial entrenched interests fighting it (The Clearinghouse and their competing private RTP network, credit card rails, etc) due to the revenue at stake (~3-5% of the economy running through this FinInfra), but as long as the infra uptake continues and it isn't sabotaged by policy and lobbying, it will deliver more efficient value transfer at scale. Also helps when merchants surcharge credit card rail payments when cheaper alternatives are enabled. Tangentially, the unbanked stand at ~4.5% in the US per the Fed [5]. That should be driven to as close to 0% as possible, which instant payments contributes towards (getting funds to recipients faster with less float and necessitating less or no credit extension, depending on use case). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fednow%20toomuchtodo&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organizations https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi... [4] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cfpb/2024/cfpb-proposes-banning-nsf-fees-declined-real-time-payments/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/cfpb/2024/cfpb-proposes-banning-... [5] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) (humorously, you mention it's very "Indian" when UPI [India's instant payment system] is probably the gold standard success story [6] alongside Pix [7] in Brazil)
  - ggm 3y ago
- patio11 3y ago
  A thing I try to keep as a through line in discussing legacy infrastructure, and checks in the U.S. are definitely legacy infrastructure, is both a) how we ended up here despite later-generation systems getting to leapfrog off what earlier-ones learned and b) why people still use wlog checks instead of going with other methods that they could also choose to use, in 2024. For example, in this issue, a major reason why some people don't do value transfer through banks directly is the banks don't really like them (for reasons), the feeling is mutual (for reasons), and other people who do not have the same POV re: banks want to give those people money in a scaled fashion, which (unless they orient their operations around a solution) will frequently involve sending out checks.
  - ggm 3y ago
    "for reasons" is doing all the heavy lifting here. I think the whole point of this series is to lift the tablecloth a bit and look at the dust bunnies underneath.
    - Swizec 3y ago
      Just in case you didn't notice: patio11, author of the comment you're replying to, is also the author behind BitsAboutMoney, the source of this article/series.
      - ggm 3y ago
        Thank you I did not realise. But, noting that I don't think it alters the intent of my comment much. For reasons
      - adolph 3y ago
        Heh, I didn’t notice it was him but when scanning through the comment noticed the “(for reasons)” and was wondering if that was some subcultural or regional dialect that so perfectly mimicked patio11.
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      He does that. He's simply eliding the explanation in his comment here, because he explained both of those things in the article. The "reasons" he elided are: * Banks don't want to do business with these particular people because they know them to be a bad business risk. They often know, via credit reporting methods, that the specific individual human standing before them has a history of cashing bad checks/committing fraud/whatever it is. Therefore, they decline to work with that person. * The people who are bad risks for banks get rather tired of dealing with banks, both because constant rejection is tiresome and because bank employees make it very clear (though unspoken explicitly) that they are persona non grata there. By contrast, the people at the check cashing shop treat them better, so they would rather take their financial business there. I get why you want the explanations and not just "for reasons", but both of these points are quite clearly spelled out in the article. So I don't really think the author deserves the grief you're giving him in this case.
- ghaff 3y ago
  For a lot of people, the occasional check works pretty well. My housekeeper comes next week. I'll leave a check for her. I'll stick the occasional check in an envelope, but mostly I just fill in some bill pay numbers with my bank and it's transparent to me if it's ACH or a check is mailed. It's just not a problem for me or for the people receiving. Of course, I don't try to pay by check in a store. (Though I did write about a $30K check when I bought my last car and that wasn't a problem either--assume they have back-end systems to verify.) Getting rid of checks just isn't a problem I care about or want to devote any mental bandwidth to.
  - ggm 3y ago
    So you just said you like writing cheques to make other people wear the 3 day clearing delay and paperwork hassle and you don't use them yourself when you are a consumer. You don't care because you're an issuer, and a net beneficiary of retention of the funds in your control for those extra days of clearing.
    - mminer237 3y ago
      Even as a receiver of checks, I don't care. It's easier to deposit than cash or PayPal. Zelle is nicer, but if I can't wait three days for the money, I already messed up in my financial management.
      - twiss 3y ago
        As the article describes, it may be convenient for you, but for many people it's inconvenient and costly to cash a check. Also, saying that those people messed up in their financial management is sort of blaming their poverty on them, while we can't know (in general) whether that's their fault or not.
        ghaff 3y ago
        If I'm paying them in person and a check is a problem I expect them to tell me and I'll pay them in cash is that's reasonable such as for already-completed work. But I'm not mailing cash or diddling around with other random payment mechanisms.
- user_7832 3y ago
  > It's positively ... Indian. It's like mainstream Indian bureaucracy levels of insane slowness. Ironically India has a very significant amount of transactions cashless/electronic, pushed by demonetization and later covid. The government has been pushing hard for it for a while and I think they succeeded.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Yes. My comparison was to the wider indian paperwork processes, not money, where India is stellar. Uruguay is another economy which has gone all-in on cashless, shops and cafes had to offer 10% discount for card transactions when I was there 8 years ago, the idea was to beat out the tax-avoidance.
- eek2121 3y ago
  Very few people these days use checks, FWIW, and all checks are electronically checked (and instantly cleared) at the local store. You can still forge a check, but the account that backs it has to have funds and you'll also need to forge an ID.
  - patio11 3y ago
    They’re certainly not instantly cleared in the standard banking use of the term? I don’t doubt that you can reduce risk by e.g. using novel infrastructure which looks up the account number on the check then uses (for example) a debit card network to check the account’s currently available balance. However, even if you were looking at someone’s balance on their mobile app while they were writing the check to you, that would not suffice to guarantee that the check would not be returned as NSF. The bank can choose to NSF it for a variety of reasons, for example if they prioritize “today’s” debit card transactions over “today’s” checks in the posting order, or a check previously deposited (and included in that available balance) gets NSFed and yanked back by another bank.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  In practice, in my part of the US, it's incredibly rare for someone to write a check.
  - adventured 3y ago
    Across Appalachia (where I grew up and now live again) checks are now exceptionally rare, which likely means they're increasingly rare everywhere in the US. Appalachia is one of the poorest places in the US and nearly all stores utilize tap to pay (either tap by card or tap by phone), checks are rare, cash is increasingly rare. You see a lot of people outside of the US try to talk about the US while having zero first-hand experience or real knowledge of it. It's very common behavior on HN and it's very common behavior on Reddit. They just repeat what someone else said as though it were automatically true.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I live in MA and I probably write 4 or so checks a month if you count the ones my bank writes. Only one or two actually hand-written. Maybe receive 1 every couple of months. I rarely pay with cash but it's not a freak even to see someone paying cash at the grocery store or for lottery tickets. So certainly not exceptionally rare. My town charges a premium for tax payments on the web because they outsource it. So, yes, I pay by check.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        I (in CA) just looked at my bank log and I hand-wrote 32 physical checks in 2023. That's in addition to the 39 checks my bank writes for me when I "Bill Pay" online. So that's roughly 6 checks a month. I always wonder about people who claim to never write checks. Like, really? Your local handyman or gardener actually accepts a credit card?
        ghaff 3y ago
        In fairness, if someone is renting, isn't paying local taxes, isn't paying local service people on a regular basis, etc. they probably don't need checks much.
- RajT88 3y ago
  > "you're not from round here" risks The what? I don't know what you're getting at with this. > Checking for forgery, active forgery presumably underway I learned just last week that forged cashier's checks are a risk, which you can get burned by even if your bank makes the mistake. Forged Cashier's checks! Insane. The whole purpose of those is to ensure the money exists before issuing.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    > The what? I don't know what you're getting at with this. When I moved to a new place, I couldn't pay for anything with a check because I still had my old address printed on the checks and most stores wouldn't accept checks with an out-of-state address printed on it. This was ~18 years ago, so things may be different.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      Ahhhhhh. For various reasons, I have never had this scenario.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        It was much harder to prosecute bounced checks across state lines iirc.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I don't know about the out of state address part, but it would probably be pretty painful in general to go around stores in the US and try to pay by check these days. Some large stores probably would have the systems to handle it but it wouldn't be normal and would cause a lot of friction. Absent a credit/debit card, you'd be better off just using cash which wouldn't be normal either but would be widely accepted.
      - simoncion 3y ago
        > Some large stores probably would have the systems to handle it... What systems to handle it? The cashier puts the check under the cash tray like you do for $100 bills, and then you toss the check in the cash bag that you send to the bank that night or at the end of the week or whatever, and the bank handles the check.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  > insane slowness slowness is a feature, not a bug, in some social situations. Most modern Americans have not experienced that kind of situation. One of the elements missing here is control - who has control over the transaction, and what are the practical methods to resolve dispute. Cash is not great at scale perhaps, but it is great for the individual in times when trust is gone, where there is unequal power relationship, and where there is real corruption inserted into ordinary transactions. As an American with some knowledge of history, I support cash, paper checks, and electronic transfer. without a doubt.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    A thing about cash, though, is that another problem with precisely those occasions when "trust is gone, where there is unequal power relationship" is that cash can be forcibly taken away from you. At every scale from muggings to home robbery to retail store robberies up to bank robbery and knocking over armored cars, cash handling imposes a security and risk management burden, with a particular component of risk of physical violence that is much less of a factor in electronic security risk models..
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      of course this is true - physical security is already something I take responsibility for.. it seems strange that this is really an issue in a civilized place. Is this more like a feeling of fear?
  - twiss 3y ago
    I may be missing your point but it seems to me that cash and paper checks are at opposite ends of the spectrum wrt who has most control over the outcome in case of disputes: with cash, the payer has to go to court to get their money back; with checks, the payer can just refuse to pay and the payee would have to go to court to get their money. Or perhaps you're saying which one to use depends on what you want? But if there's an unequal power relationship, the person with more power (probably the payer) will usually choose. So to fix that, it's not enough for cash to be an option, checks need to not be an option. (Electronic transfers can be an option, as long as they're set up so that the payer can't unilaterally take the money back.)
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > It has always confused me When this feeling occurs, why is the next step "wow the US sucks" instead of "there must be some good reason that I don't understand."
  - peacefulhat 3y ago
    the experience of being in other countries
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - ggm 3y ago
    So what do you think is the positive reason for US exceptionalism here?
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      As opposed to European exceptionalism that assumes that whatever is done in Europe is not only standard but also better?
      - isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
        I what way shape or form can settling money over several days be better than instant transfers with direct auth?
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        You can do that too! It's just that you can also use checks. I don't see the problem, instant money transfers are ubiquitous and were easy for me even as a visitor in the US. The fact that bank transferts take longer doesn't really matter day to day, they just don't use them for that
      - ggm 3y ago
        Just to be clear, I live in Australia and we also have 3 day cheque clearing but the banks and government are closing out on cheque processes and almost everything now is payid which is instant settlement. From what little I read it's more reliable than venmo.
- thekingshorses 3y ago
  I have FD in an Indian bank, and I lost the receipt/certificate they gave me. It's going to be a month-long process to get my money back. In America, it's not like Indian bureaucracy levels of insane slowness.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Also recommend "The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives" by Lisa Servon on the topic. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509126878/what-is-driving-the-unbanking-of-america https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509126878/what-is-driving-the... https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781328745705 https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781328745705
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  I don't understand. There is a near-infinite number of banks and credit unions that don't charge fees or allow over drafting. I use one of them. Is their existence being hidden from people? I just googled "bank with highest interest rate" about a decade ago and the top result was a bank that ALSO had no fees or minimums their accounts.
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  - kasey_junk 3y ago
    Lots and lots of people are unbanked because none of those banks and credit unions will allow them to open accounts. Largely because they all use the same data brokers to determine credit worthiness.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      You generally don't need a credit report to open a checking account, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChexSystems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChexSystems seems analogous.
      - shitlord 3y ago
        Yes, ChexSystems is mentioned in the original blog post.
    - conductr 3y ago
      ChexSystems is the big one afaik
twiss 3y ago
This'll be obvious to anyone who's ever used any other payment system, but it'd be better if more of the risk of payment was borne by the payer rather than the payee. For example, re. this line from the article: > In the case where [...] the government later comes to the conclusion that it didn't really want to pay them If the government comes to that conclusion, and has a legitimate reason (e.g. you didn't do the work they paid you to do), they should have ample ability to take you to court to get the money back. By making the payee cover this risk, they're essentially paying for the untrustworthiness of other payees.
gjvc 3y ago
related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting
StewardMcOy 3y ago
I know this article is very informative, and I typically like to keep discussion substantive, but that artwork at the top really distracted me from actually reading for a good few minutes. I don't really care of it's AI or not. The picture is just strange. The empty hoodie just standing by the window, watching a worker who is seemingly undisturbed by it. The odd placement of the desks, the fact that all of the text is gibberish, but looks just close enough to real that you pause to examine it. Except for the big "CHECK" on the wall, which isn't something you'd actually see in a real establishment that cashes checks. More and more, I see companies using art that they would refuse to pay for if a contracted illustrator turned it in. Seemingly because it's AI, it's like they become blind to how bad it is.
- throwup238 3y ago
  Bloggers will swallow a lot for four cents (the cost of a single decent Hd DallE3 image generation via the API).
- galdosdi 3y ago
  Yikes, it really is distracting. What really gets me is the screwed up, subtly M C Escher like perspective. Also, yeah, this looks like a weird bank / accountant's tax office pastiche, not at all like a check cashing place. It's patio11 though, all of whose writing on the nuts and bolts of finance are fascinating, so it's easily forgiven, heh Edit: in fact I'm already 3 paragraphs in and so fascinated by the, typical for patio11, high level of detail combined with easy novel like readability, that I almost feel guilty for having piled on to criticize the awful AI image. But still, yeah, I agree AI images like this are actually worse than no illustration at all
  - StewardMcOy 3y ago
    Right? That's why I was hesitant to bring this up too. But the picture really is that distracting. Like, the article's good enough that it doesn't need an image. Or if you really think you need it, grab some free stock photo or clipart or something. Or get good AI art. Don't settle for bad AI art.
mito88 3y ago
check or cheque?
- cperciva 3y ago
  In American English, "check". In British English, "cheque".
  - buildsjets 3y ago
    Does one cash a cheque or cache a cheque? A user upthread seems to think it is the latter, and that really bothers me for some reason.
    - defrost 3y ago
      The church was often asked to cache small Czechs following the violent end to the Prague Spring.
    - cperciva 3y ago
      It depends if you're converting it to cash or hiding it in a cache. In most cases you mean the former.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Aren't they both obsolete?
johtso 3y ago
I never use cheques, but had a strange cheque related situation a few years ago. For some reason an empty bank account that I never use had gone £100 overdrawn, supposedly due to a cheque that had been cached, and was racking up fees. After hours of phone calls, I learnt that bank account numbers are recycled (!) after accounts are closed.. so the previous owner of my account number had tried to cache a cheque using a legitimate chequebook that they still owned. Still amazes me that the system could be so insecure!
- manwe150 3y ago
  My understanding is that the other individual has committed several felony crimes to write that check (various forms of banking fraud and theft), and given their signature to it as well, as evidence of both intent and proof of their identity. So it seems to me about as insecure as saying "I can't believe the sidewalks here are so insecure near roads, that a car could just drive down onto them and hit people." The idea is not to make it hard to move money around, but to instead make the punishment very high for trying to cheat the system.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    Sometimes relying on deterrence is necessary, but it's surprising to do it when there are seemingly easier ways - like not reusing account numbers.
  - cperciva 3y ago
    Given the stated currency, I suspect the bank account in question is in the UK, so the criminal law wouldn't be entirely identical. But in any case, it wasn't necessarily a crime -- someone (especially if elderly or impaired) might have accidentally used the wrong chequebook. It's only a crime to write a cheque on someone else's account if you do it deliberately. To me, the biggest issue here is simply "banks should not recycle account numbers".
  - pests 3y ago
    I think this would happen more often with people with many accounts and many checkbooks accidently using the wrong book after closing an account, by accident.
legitster 3y ago
One of my favorite types of establishments here in America is a bar that cashes checks. If you really want to get a sense of how some people radically different than you live their lives, spend some time at the counter after the construction sites close for the day and people stumble in with their day's pay. I nodded along whole-heartedly into the digression on banking and class in America. When you actually think about what's going on in these places, it's a wonderfully curious twist on our idea of "trustworthiness".
- gosub100 3y ago
  In Nevada, casinos will cash your checks for you.
rtpg 3y ago
> And so by presenting your check, which you think is substantially terminating a transaction, you are actually creating a new credit extension with your bank. They are extremely aware that you just asked them to advance you money, even if you are not aware that you did that. They already partially underwrote this extension of credit; that is why you were not shooed out of the building when you originally asked for a checking account. I'm extremely confused about the usage of the word "need", and the implication that this need for the line of credit is what generates all these downstream problems. The person depositing a check wants the money soon, sure. And the check bouncing or not depends on the person writing the check. The person depositing the check "should" "just wait"? Like don't extend the credit? Credit card processors hold onto your money for this exact sort of reason! Yes, there are trust considerations. But don't move money that is not quasi-guaranteed? Pay for money flow? Make the trust relationship between banks and not between atomic actors? Risks are risks are risks but saying that people should be unbanked because their checks will bounce... I guess it's weird to have these pieces of paper have so much trust associated to them in the first place? Maybe the check network doesn't work as well in this model. Fraud is a whole thing as well of course. I guess in this model people trust checks enough to allow groceries to be paid by check. Just feels extremely suboptimal.
- twiss 3y ago
  The word "need" does not appear in the quote :') I think the author is just describing how it typically works rather than how it needs to work.
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- bombcar 3y ago
  You can ask the bank to hold the funds until final clearance - which can be quite long. Weeks or more. Often if you really need to do that, you’re better off taking the check the bank it was drawn on, often having to open an account there first. Still can take quite awhile. But before computers and electric communication, this was the best and fastest way, and since the vast majority of transactions are legitimate, it works. Pratchett’s Going Postal is a decent look at the system.
anon-sre-srm 3y ago
Rationalizing different degrees of predatory banking is still being a bottom feeder. This is why USPS should become a credit union anyone can use.
- ambigious7777 3y ago
  (non-american here) Huh? Why? Isn't the USPS a mail company? I don't get what that has to do with banking.
  - tw04 3y ago
    Because there are branches everywhere in the US making access easy whether you’re in New York or Montana. There’s no other department of the federal government with that coverage. They also are quasi financial already as you can get a USPS money order.
    - deleted 3y ago
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  - anon-sre-srm 3y ago
    I guess you haven't traveled much. Post offices in other countries also provide fundamental banking services. Right now, one can get money orders from USPS.
  - unmole 3y ago
    It's fairly common for postal systems to provide basic banking services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
  - curtisf 3y ago
    The USPS is a government agency that already has physical branches in almost every community in the US, which would make it an extremely accessible bank for the 4.5% or so of households who currently don't have a bank. It could also be pressure on American banks to treat their customers better, since the USPS is not burdened with a responsibility to generate dividends for shareholders. The USPS is also not directly funded by taxes (though it is indirectly subsidized via it's tax status and sole right of access to mailboxes), and with the waning popularity of letter mail, would become more self sufficient in the long term if it branched out into other services Other countries also combine banking and postal branches for similar reasons, like Japan (although it is in the process of being privatized).
slavboj 3y ago
Patrick does not mention that a primary reason even the "banked" use check cashing services is that deposited funds are trivially legible for the purposes of attaching court judgements, particularly child support. Cash is far more difficult to trace.
- conductr 3y ago
  How so? The court issues wage garnishments, it gets taken out of the check directly. This might help people paid under the table or in checks from clients but I think that’s a small cohort.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    I have no experience with this but my understanding is that they don’t go straight to wage garnishes (which I’ve heard the bureaucracy is slow to handle in situations where the garnished individual moves). That happens if you don’t meet payments as required.
- willvarfar 3y ago
  The visibility would also come from paying child support via any kind of bank transfer? It's only the cash that is difficult to trace (and requires people to actually meet, which seems another big downside in the child support payment scenario).
- p_l 3y ago
  At least in poland, the standard measure from simplest payments to settling overdue debt between companies or to government, is "bank confirmation" - a printout/pdf from a bank declaring that a transaction with those details was made at this time.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
To a German, where checks never were a thing, because we moved to wire transfer at the beginning of the 20th century, this is amazing.
- qb 3y ago
  I have received checks in Germany in the last decade, specifically when a health insurer refunded premiums but did not have bank details on file for me.
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    Sorry, not a native English speaker, probably missused "not a thing". I thought it would mean "not important" or "not something people use all the time" or "irrelevant".
    - mercutio2 3y ago
      You wanted “not common”, sounds like. “Not a thing” is a confusing idiom. It specifically means never happens, ever, but the idiom is frequently used in contexts where hyperbole is expected, so a literal translation accounting for the hyperbole might be something more like “I’ve seen it once, but it’s vanishingly rare”.
- odiroot 3y ago
  Techniker Krankenkasse still sends paper cheques. I wouldn't consider Germany to be avant-garde of banking in any sense.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  I am happy for you that you live in the blissful ignorance of thinking checks aren't a thing in Germany. You will curse the day you discover you're wrong. They are exceptionally rare, to the point where many people have never seen one and fintech/neobanks simply don't support them at all. Unfortunately, some organizations/businesses do use them. They're particularly popular when some entity is required to pay you, knows your postal address, doesn't know your bank account, and doesn't care about your satisfaction with them. They just mail you a check and are done with it, making it your problem. As a bonus, they have a good chance of not having to actually pay you because you don't want to deal with the check or forget. Of course, there is no electronic deposit either. And while I'm talking about German companies above, US companies of course absolutely love doing this for the same reasons, meaning you have a foreign, USD denominated check. Hopping on a flight to New York and going to one of these check cashing places might be the easiest way to cash these, and could be comparable in cost to trying to do it locally.
cowthulhu 3y ago
> "If you use “kind girl behind the counter” language about the 0.01% most aggravating customer once, you will not be a bank teller tomorrow. So bank tellers basically never use those words, and instead can inflect “Can I help you, sir?” in a way which leaves absolutely no doubt as to how welcome the new arrival to the branch is." I found myself nodding along to a lot of the contents of this article, but I totally disagree with this part... it runs totally counter to my experience. To be fair, maybe my experience was the exception that proves the rule (or maybe things have changed since I worked front-line at a financial institution), but the expectation that you would be cold or unwelcoming to a customer (or prospective customer) based on class or perceived class was absolutely not the case. Like, I cannot stress that enough. Don't get me wrong, there were procedural safeguards such as "no checking account if you have <650 FICO", but you were expected to be welcoming to everyone who walked in the door and "they seemed poor" would certainly not be an acceptable excuse for snubbing a customer.
- jstanley 3y ago
  The point isn't to directly "snub" the customer, but to talk to them in a formal, professional, superficially polite way that the kind of customer you don't want does not find welcoming, because in their normal life they do not encounter it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
chefandy 3y ago
The article it’s well built and the author is knowledgeable about the business side of check cashing, but as soon as I saw the title graphic, I thought “oh boy, here we go.” I assume the author had the best intentions and I acknowledge the somewhat tongue-in-cheek style, but the soigné tone and the assumption that the topic is alien to and deeply beneath anyone reading the article is obnoxious. Check cashing places were an important part of my scrappier younger-adult years— cultural rifts like this have always kept me from being truly socially comfortable among a big chunk of the tech crowd no matter how much noise they make about inclusivity.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  The DALL-E generated hero image is terrible, and the tone of the article is beyond patronising, I couldn’t get past the “money transfer between banks is magic”.
  - badgersnake 3y ago
    That’s a misquote. The author says to assume that it is magic and the reason for that is that it’s not the topic of the blog post. This makes complete sense to me since the article is long enough already.
    - mdekkers 3y ago
      It’s just one example of the insufferably patronising tone of the article. Just stating that a bank transfer happens is enough. No need to assume anything. Making the assumption that an explanation is required is totally unnecessary.
- eru 3y ago
  From the article: > One of the reasons I covered the checks as a payment method recently was to lay the groundwork for talking about some of the fascinating alternative financial world around them. In the main, this helps people at the socioeconomic margins turn payroll and other checks into cash (or otherwise immediately spendable value) in return for a fee. This is not how you, reader, probably deal with checks, and the existence of this industry / product have been controversial for many years. So what's funny is that the topic is actually totally alien to me. But that's because I have only ever dealt with one or two checks in my life (when interacting with an American company paying interview expenses). And otherwise, I've never handled them at all. They just have been out-of-use in my parts of the world (Europe, Singapore, Australia) for at least as long as I've been economically active in them. From what I've heard, the US is going in that direction as well? So many younger people would have never handled checks there either? But the paragraph just assumes that you would be familiar with checks in general, but not with check cashing. (Later on in the article, our author explains the basics of how well-enough-off people handle checks. So that's fine.) Edit: reading further down, I'm ok with the tone of the article and don't share the concerns.
webninja 3y ago
The people using these check cashing services often have someone taking money out of their bank account — hence why they don’t/can’t use one.
- redsoundbanner 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ozfive 3y ago
    I find it ironic that your truth is delivered with the cowardice of a throwaway account. Essentially don't write a check with your mouth your rear-end can't cash. CashApp me at my username if you agree. All proceeds go to student loan repayment.
Scoundreller 3y ago
One thing I like about Canada is that you can take any federal government cheque into any bank branch with ID and by law they have to cash it for you for free. Account or not.
- StayTrue 3y ago
  Never heard of this so I looked it up [0]. I was a poor student working for the federal government and always had hold periods on physical paycheques deposited in person. Once or twice it was a hassle. I guess one would have to know their rights and be prepared to assert them. [0] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/banking/cashing-government-cheque.html https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
Animats 3y ago
This is more about how it used to work. Now, there's a whole industry devoted to getting in between employers and employees and siphoning off fees. First, there's the "pay by depositing to a debit card" racket.[1] "The biggest issue is the hidden fees. Some providers charge cardholders for common activities such as receiving paper statements, over-drafting, replacing cards, transferring money to another account, making withdrawals at most ATMs, and even not using the card for a period of time." Then, there are things such as DailyPay.[2] This combines payroll, a debit card, and payday loans into one convenient fee-laden package.[3] Worse, not getting paid means trying to reach the intermediary's customer support. [1] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-are-payroll-debit-cards-2062769 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-are-payroll-debit-cards... [2] https://www.dailypay.com/ https://www.dailypay.com/ [3] https://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/daily_pay_services.html https://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/daily_pay_services....
eru 3y ago
> That is certainly not the only pathway to being non-banked, but it is an extremely common one. Often, consumers self-select out because they try banking for a while and then repeatedly get assessed high fees which they do not feel are legitimate, such as fees for overdrafting their accounts. To bang a very old drum, the decision to move from everyone-pays-a-Netflix-subscription-for-banking to banking-is-free-except-we-assess-high-fees-if-you-screw-up created winners and losers. We called that one "free checking." Descriptively it subsidizes the middle class by using fees assessed stochastically to people in persistent economic precarity. In particular, young members of the middle class (college students and recent graduates in their least-well-off years) benefitted a lot. Though I wonder whether you could just get an account where your deposited checks just take a while to clear (when the bank actually has the money)? And where any attempt at overdrafting would just fail? Basically, a bank account where the bank does not extend you credit. A purely 'pre-paid' affair. I guess the kinds of people who would want these accounts are on average not good customers? (I know that they have these kinds of accounts in eg Germany where I grew up. But your average German is averse to taking on debt; so you just get average Germans signing up, instead of the adverse selection you'd have in the US?)
- gambiting 3y ago
  >>Basically, a bank account where the bank does not extend you credit. A purely 'pre-paid' affair. That's like......every normal bank account? At least in Poland, UK and Germany(as you mentioned). By default you don't get any overdraft, you can't go below zero so to speak. If you do(with an offline transaction that wasn't authorized live with the bank) then usually you get 24 hours to pay it off and start paying heavy penalties beyond that point.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    that is precisely what “overdraft fees” means
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      Britain does have a "basic account", usually used by people with debt problems. It has no unarranged overdraft facility. Example: https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/basic-account/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/basic-account/ I assume the debit card is configured to refuse offline transactions.
bernardlunn 3y ago
Business should not pay by check - only in America is this technical debt so prevalent. Cash or payment into bank account please
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I have been working since 1996 and never been paid by cheque. I find cheques very annoying to deal with. Usually get them on some edge case like a government refund but it has been years since that even. The other rare case is a bank cheque for a deposit for buying a house etc. Although I bet that is rare now just do an instant bank transfer. I do vaguely remember the 80s and there was a fair bit of cheque usage along with those credit card duplicator things where the sales person takes an imprint of the card. Wild times!
- astrange 3y ago
  What if the business doesn't know your bank account prior to payment and neither of you want them to know it? (Imagine a business that occasionally mails random people $10.48 without asking them first.)
rkagerer 3y ago
I did a lot of work on remote deposit when Check 21 came out (the legislation that paved the way for images of checks to be used in place of the paper monetary instrument). It's crazy what occasionally got passed through. I remember a VP complaining about a failed deposit - the cheque image was a completely unintelligible scrawl of blocky black pixels - like white noise on an old TV. I explained why it got flagged by the software and that it wasn't eligible for deposit. They didn't care - uploaded it to the bank who happily cleared it for them with funds available instantly. It's all about how big a customer you are, you're perceived risk profile and your relationship with the bank.
JustLurking2022 3y ago
Honestly, the article rambled & ranted as much as it informed. TL;DR: Check cashing exists because banks don't want to deal with people who deposit checks with a high risk profile (whether due to fraud or lack of funds by the payer). Unsurprisingly, this risk gets priced into the product. Dealing with bounced checks from such people often involves behavior that most of a bank's customers would consider somewhere between impolite and disturbing. Also, many consumers of check cashing do not have state issued IDs and may not be up for dealing with KYC checks. The situation has gotten somewhat better for low income people in that government benefits are delivered electronically, without needing to cash a check and some emerging electronic payment options may improve it further.
chiph 3y ago
How well known you are to the bank matters. My grandfather was a builder and if he didn't have his checkbook on him, he would pay a subcontractor via a check written on whatever piece of scrap wood was around. The local bank had no problem with depositing it because he'd done it many times before and he had a good reputation in town. Many of the rules and regulations have come about because writing checks became a non-local thing. You'd send off a check to pay for a magazine subscription and it'd get processed somewhere far away, like South Dakota. They don't know who you are, so like the article said - writing a check became an extension of credit, and the writer needed some verification as to their creditworthiness.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Woah, what year? How can this be legal?
  - chiph 3y ago
    This was the late 1930's so quite long ago. Pretty much every bank now has policies that would cause them to seriously object to a roof shingle being used as a check. So not illegal - just very unlikely to be accepted. Could you create your own paper checks? I think you can, as long as it looks/feels like a check and has all the info on it in the correct places. You don't have to use any security features to prevent check washing (but it's a good idea). You don't even need the magnetic ink, as the check will be optically scanned, with hand-processing as a fallback (they will attach a MICR correction strip). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
I think the article glosses over the fraud aspect a lot. I would expect these places to be prime targets for all kinds of fraud. I'm surprised personal checks are accepted at all and (if the example in the article is realistic) so cheaply. They have to manage that somehow beyond a reputation system. Part of it might be the legal system - I believe check fraud is seen as more serious, with much higher penalties, in many countries, specifically because the system of checks wouldn't work without it.
aftbit 3y ago
Honestly this is a bit crazy to me. Why does processing a check require an extension of credit here in 2024? Why can't the banks validate the check and transfer the money while you wait a few seconds at the teller window? All of the alternative fintech solutions can do that. The prepaid debit cards that unbanked people use instead can do that. Heck, even the blockchain can do it, for way too much money. Sure, back in the day of couriers carrying checks, it made sense that it might take a few days to know. Today, with the internet and electronic presentment, theoretically the whole system could be transparently replaced with one that can clear the vast majority of checks in seconds. Banks could offer checking accounts to even the least creditworthy people simply by not extending them any credit.
- jldugger 3y ago
  > in 2024? Why can't the banks validate the check and transfer the money while you wait a few seconds at the teller window? In late 2023 FedNow was introduced, which should facilitate exactly that. But it's optional for banking institutions, and the US is riddled with small institutions that cannot or will not volunteer their capital to invest in the tech required.
astrange 3y ago
I think the way patio11 writes about poor people comes off more classist than if he just called them shiftless criminals instead of repeatedly being extremely overtly nice about them while also saying they can't do anything right, can't interact with any bureaucracy successfully and don't know how to cook. Besides that, I don't think they actually eat at McDonald's much. Their relationship with fast food is that they work there.
aaroninsf 3y ago
FTA: "it’s really hard to expressively, passionately hate this business and not hate the young lady working in it" Fact check: so false, as to call in question the author's good faith.
colinsane 3y ago
> Now you shouldn’t expect from me the level of academic rigor associated with scholars at e.g. Harvard; on the Internet, we cite our sources. since you're comfortable making a jab like that, would you mind linking me to specific passages that the Harvard lady failed to cite in her work? the whole scandal is so buried in surface-level coverage that i legitimately cannot figure out what she failed to cite.

215 points by admp 3y ago

Patrick's stuff is so good. I find myself rereading his old posts when I'm bored, just to pick up on details I didn't remember from the first time I read it.

SoftTalker 3y ago
He's kind of wordy, and comes off as a bit self-important, but yeah I do read most of his stuff.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Wordy? Self-important? That’s a lot of writing online these days.

ggm 3y ago

... in america. It has always confused me how simultaneously the US money system is operating in the most advanced interconnected economy imaginable which fosters innovation (bankruptcy laws in the US are designed to make it easy to try again, they encourage entrepreneurship) and yet.. the whole credit union, banking crash, over inflated economy has made them retain unbelievably archaic approaches to money on paper. Checking for forgery, active forgery presumably underway, 3+ day clearing, "you're not from round here" risks, It's just insane. Go to walmart, buy a stored value card, you can do dollar events with zero friction but present a cheque at the counter, and you're in the slow path. It's positively ... Indian. It's like mainstream Indian bureaucracy levels of insane slowness. It's even had films with Whoopi Goldberg made about it (she is a cheque processor in some movie, doing it by hand at a 1970s vintage cheque processing machine. I think its "made in america" with Ted Danson)

toomuchtodo 3y ago
So, there is a flywheel coming up to speed: FedNow [1]. I beat this horse to death here [2], but only because it is so revolutionary (for US financial infra). It catches us up with 54 other nation states with instant payment systems. It removes credit risk from delayed settlement, checks (and the risk that goes along with paper instruments), the need for a deposit account to underwrite you (if they simply disable any ability to go below $0). It's run by the Fed as a cost recovery utility, not a for profit enterprise to squeeze as much profit from as possible. There are already 400 participants who have signed on in less than a year of the network being live [3] (the list includes Chase Bank and the US Treasury), and the CFPB is already getting in front of financial institutions attempting to charge insufficient funds fees for instant payments when unnecessary [4]. There are substantial entrenched interests fighting it (The Clearinghouse and their competing private RTP network, credit card rails, etc) due to the revenue at stake (~3-5% of the economy running through this FinInfra), but as long as the infra uptake continues and it isn't sabotaged by policy and lobbying, it will deliver more efficient value transfer at scale. Also helps when merchants surcharge credit card rail payments when cheaper alternatives are enabled. Tangentially, the unbanked stand at ~4.5% in the US per the Fed [5]. That should be driven to as close to 0% as possible, which instant payments contributes towards (getting funds to recipients faster with less float and necessitating less or no credit extension, depending on use case). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fednow%20toomuchtodo&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organizations https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi... [4] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cfpb/2024/cfpb-proposes-banning-nsf-fees-declined-real-time-payments/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/cfpb/2024/cfpb-proposes-banning-... [5] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) (humorously, you mention it's very "Indian" when UPI [India's instant payment system] is probably the gold standard success story [6] alongside Pix [7] in Brazil)
- ggm 3y ago
patio11 3y ago
A thing I try to keep as a through line in discussing legacy infrastructure, and checks in the U.S. are definitely legacy infrastructure, is both a) how we ended up here despite later-generation systems getting to leapfrog off what earlier-ones learned and b) why people still use wlog checks instead of going with other methods that they could also choose to use, in 2024. For example, in this issue, a major reason why some people don't do value transfer through banks directly is the banks don't really like them (for reasons), the feeling is mutual (for reasons), and other people who do not have the same POV re: banks want to give those people money in a scaled fashion, which (unless they orient their operations around a solution) will frequently involve sending out checks.
- ggm 3y ago
  "for reasons" is doing all the heavy lifting here. I think the whole point of this series is to lift the tablecloth a bit and look at the dust bunnies underneath.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    Just in case you didn't notice: patio11, author of the comment you're replying to, is also the author behind BitsAboutMoney, the source of this article/series.
    - ggm 3y ago
      Thank you I did not realise. But, noting that I don't think it alters the intent of my comment much. For reasons
    - adolph 3y ago
      Heh, I didn’t notice it was him but when scanning through the comment noticed the “(for reasons)” and was wondering if that was some subcultural or regional dialect that so perfectly mimicked patio11.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    He does that. He's simply eliding the explanation in his comment here, because he explained both of those things in the article. The "reasons" he elided are: * Banks don't want to do business with these particular people because they know them to be a bad business risk. They often know, via credit reporting methods, that the specific individual human standing before them has a history of cashing bad checks/committing fraud/whatever it is. Therefore, they decline to work with that person. * The people who are bad risks for banks get rather tired of dealing with banks, both because constant rejection is tiresome and because bank employees make it very clear (though unspoken explicitly) that they are persona non grata there. By contrast, the people at the check cashing shop treat them better, so they would rather take their financial business there. I get why you want the explanations and not just "for reasons", but both of these points are quite clearly spelled out in the article. So I don't really think the author deserves the grief you're giving him in this case.
ghaff 3y ago
For a lot of people, the occasional check works pretty well. My housekeeper comes next week. I'll leave a check for her. I'll stick the occasional check in an envelope, but mostly I just fill in some bill pay numbers with my bank and it's transparent to me if it's ACH or a check is mailed. It's just not a problem for me or for the people receiving. Of course, I don't try to pay by check in a store. (Though I did write about a $30K check when I bought my last car and that wasn't a problem either--assume they have back-end systems to verify.) Getting rid of checks just isn't a problem I care about or want to devote any mental bandwidth to.
- ggm 3y ago
  So you just said you like writing cheques to make other people wear the 3 day clearing delay and paperwork hassle and you don't use them yourself when you are a consumer. You don't care because you're an issuer, and a net beneficiary of retention of the funds in your control for those extra days of clearing.
  - mminer237 3y ago
    Even as a receiver of checks, I don't care. It's easier to deposit than cash or PayPal. Zelle is nicer, but if I can't wait three days for the money, I already messed up in my financial management.
    - twiss 3y ago
      As the article describes, it may be convenient for you, but for many people it's inconvenient and costly to cash a check. Also, saying that those people messed up in their financial management is sort of blaming their poverty on them, while we can't know (in general) whether that's their fault or not.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        If I'm paying them in person and a check is a problem I expect them to tell me and I'll pay them in cash is that's reasonable such as for already-completed work. But I'm not mailing cash or diddling around with other random payment mechanisms.
user_7832 3y ago
> It's positively ... Indian. It's like mainstream Indian bureaucracy levels of insane slowness. Ironically India has a very significant amount of transactions cashless/electronic, pushed by demonetization and later covid. The government has been pushing hard for it for a while and I think they succeeded.
- ggm 3y ago
  Yes. My comparison was to the wider indian paperwork processes, not money, where India is stellar. Uruguay is another economy which has gone all-in on cashless, shops and cafes had to offer 10% discount for card transactions when I was there 8 years ago, the idea was to beat out the tax-avoidance.
eek2121 3y ago
Very few people these days use checks, FWIW, and all checks are electronically checked (and instantly cleared) at the local store. You can still forge a check, but the account that backs it has to have funds and you'll also need to forge an ID.
- patio11 3y ago
  They’re certainly not instantly cleared in the standard banking use of the term? I don’t doubt that you can reduce risk by e.g. using novel infrastructure which looks up the account number on the check then uses (for example) a debit card network to check the account’s currently available balance. However, even if you were looking at someone’s balance on their mobile app while they were writing the check to you, that would not suffice to guarantee that the check would not be returned as NSF. The bank can choose to NSF it for a variety of reasons, for example if they prioritize “today’s” debit card transactions over “today’s” checks in the posting order, or a check previously deposited (and included in that available balance) gets NSFed and yanked back by another bank.
JohnFen 3y ago
In practice, in my part of the US, it's incredibly rare for someone to write a check.
- adventured 3y ago
  Across Appalachia (where I grew up and now live again) checks are now exceptionally rare, which likely means they're increasingly rare everywhere in the US. Appalachia is one of the poorest places in the US and nearly all stores utilize tap to pay (either tap by card or tap by phone), checks are rare, cash is increasingly rare. You see a lot of people outside of the US try to talk about the US while having zero first-hand experience or real knowledge of it. It's very common behavior on HN and it's very common behavior on Reddit. They just repeat what someone else said as though it were automatically true.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I live in MA and I probably write 4 or so checks a month if you count the ones my bank writes. Only one or two actually hand-written. Maybe receive 1 every couple of months. I rarely pay with cash but it's not a freak even to see someone paying cash at the grocery store or for lottery tickets. So certainly not exceptionally rare. My town charges a premium for tax payments on the web because they outsource it. So, yes, I pay by check.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      I (in CA) just looked at my bank log and I hand-wrote 32 physical checks in 2023. That's in addition to the 39 checks my bank writes for me when I "Bill Pay" online. So that's roughly 6 checks a month. I always wonder about people who claim to never write checks. Like, really? Your local handyman or gardener actually accepts a credit card?
      - ghaff 3y ago
        In fairness, if someone is renting, isn't paying local taxes, isn't paying local service people on a regular basis, etc. they probably don't need checks much.
RajT88 3y ago
> "you're not from round here" risks The what? I don't know what you're getting at with this. > Checking for forgery, active forgery presumably underway I learned just last week that forged cashier's checks are a risk, which you can get burned by even if your bank makes the mistake. Forged Cashier's checks! Insane. The whole purpose of those is to ensure the money exists before issuing.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  > The what? I don't know what you're getting at with this. When I moved to a new place, I couldn't pay for anything with a check because I still had my old address printed on the checks and most stores wouldn't accept checks with an out-of-state address printed on it. This was ~18 years ago, so things may be different.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    Ahhhhhh. For various reasons, I have never had this scenario.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It was much harder to prosecute bounced checks across state lines iirc.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I don't know about the out of state address part, but it would probably be pretty painful in general to go around stores in the US and try to pay by check these days. Some large stores probably would have the systems to handle it but it wouldn't be normal and would cause a lot of friction. Absent a credit/debit card, you'd be better off just using cash which wouldn't be normal either but would be widely accepted.
    - simoncion 3y ago
      > Some large stores probably would have the systems to handle it... What systems to handle it? The cashier puts the check under the cash tray like you do for $100 bills, and then you toss the check in the cash bag that you send to the bank that night or at the end of the week or whatever, and the bank handles the check.
mistrial9 3y ago
> insane slowness slowness is a feature, not a bug, in some social situations. Most modern Americans have not experienced that kind of situation. One of the elements missing here is control - who has control over the transaction, and what are the practical methods to resolve dispute. Cash is not great at scale perhaps, but it is great for the individual in times when trust is gone, where there is unequal power relationship, and where there is real corruption inserted into ordinary transactions. As an American with some knowledge of history, I support cash, paper checks, and electronic transfer. without a doubt.
- jameshart 3y ago
  A thing about cash, though, is that another problem with precisely those occasions when "trust is gone, where there is unequal power relationship" is that cash can be forcibly taken away from you. At every scale from muggings to home robbery to retail store robberies up to bank robbery and knocking over armored cars, cash handling imposes a security and risk management burden, with a particular component of risk of physical violence that is much less of a factor in electronic security risk models..
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    of course this is true - physical security is already something I take responsibility for.. it seems strange that this is really an issue in a civilized place. Is this more like a feeling of fear?
- twiss 3y ago
  I may be missing your point but it seems to me that cash and paper checks are at opposite ends of the spectrum wrt who has most control over the outcome in case of disputes: with cash, the payer has to go to court to get their money back; with checks, the payer can just refuse to pay and the payee would have to go to court to get their money. Or perhaps you're saying which one to use depends on what you want? But if there's an unequal power relationship, the person with more power (probably the payer) will usually choose. So to fix that, it's not enough for cash to be an option, checks need to not be an option. (Electronic transfers can be an option, as long as they're set up so that the payer can't unilaterally take the money back.)
rootusrootus 3y ago
> It has always confused me When this feeling occurs, why is the next step "wow the US sucks" instead of "there must be some good reason that I don't understand."
- peacefulhat 3y ago
  the experience of being in other countries
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ggm 3y ago
  So what do you think is the positive reason for US exceptionalism here?
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    As opposed to European exceptionalism that assumes that whatever is done in Europe is not only standard but also better?
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
      I what way shape or form can settling money over several days be better than instant transfers with direct auth?
      - mardifoufs 3y ago
        You can do that too! It's just that you can also use checks. I don't see the problem, instant money transfers are ubiquitous and were easy for me even as a visitor in the US. The fact that bank transferts take longer doesn't really matter day to day, they just don't use them for that
    - ggm 3y ago
      Just to be clear, I live in Australia and we also have 3 day cheque clearing but the banks and government are closing out on cheque processes and almost everything now is payid which is instant settlement. From what little I read it's more reliable than venmo.
thekingshorses 3y ago
I have FD in an Indian bank, and I lost the receipt/certificate they gave me. It's going to be a month-long process to get my money back. In America, it's not like Indian bureaucracy levels of insane slowness.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Also recommend "The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives" by Lisa Servon on the topic. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509126878/what-is-driving-the-unbanking-of-america https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509126878/what-is-driving-the... https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781328745705 https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781328745705

snakeyjake 3y ago
I don't understand. There is a near-infinite number of banks and credit unions that don't charge fees or allow over drafting. I use one of them. Is their existence being hidden from people? I just googled "bank with highest interest rate" about a decade ago and the top result was a bank that ALSO had no fees or minimums their accounts.
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- kasey_junk 3y ago
  Lots and lots of people are unbanked because none of those banks and credit unions will allow them to open accounts. Largely because they all use the same data brokers to determine credit worthiness.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    You generally don't need a credit report to open a checking account, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChexSystems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChexSystems seems analogous.
    - shitlord 3y ago
      Yes, ChexSystems is mentioned in the original blog post.
  - conductr 3y ago
    ChexSystems is the big one afaik

twiss 3y ago

This'll be obvious to anyone who's ever used any other payment system, but it'd be better if more of the risk of payment was borne by the payer rather than the payee. For example, re. this line from the article: > In the case where [...] the government later comes to the conclusion that it didn't really want to pay them If the government comes to that conclusion, and has a legitimate reason (e.g. you didn't do the work they paid you to do), they should have ample ability to take you to court to get the money back. By making the payee cover this risk, they're essentially paying for the untrustworthiness of other payees.

gjvc 3y ago

related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting

StewardMcOy 3y ago

I know this article is very informative, and I typically like to keep discussion substantive, but that artwork at the top really distracted me from actually reading for a good few minutes. I don't really care of it's AI or not. The picture is just strange. The empty hoodie just standing by the window, watching a worker who is seemingly undisturbed by it. The odd placement of the desks, the fact that all of the text is gibberish, but looks just close enough to real that you pause to examine it. Except for the big "CHECK" on the wall, which isn't something you'd actually see in a real establishment that cashes checks. More and more, I see companies using art that they would refuse to pay for if a contracted illustrator turned it in. Seemingly because it's AI, it's like they become blind to how bad it is.

throwup238 3y ago
Bloggers will swallow a lot for four cents (the cost of a single decent Hd DallE3 image generation via the API).
galdosdi 3y ago
Yikes, it really is distracting. What really gets me is the screwed up, subtly M C Escher like perspective. Also, yeah, this looks like a weird bank / accountant's tax office pastiche, not at all like a check cashing place. It's patio11 though, all of whose writing on the nuts and bolts of finance are fascinating, so it's easily forgiven, heh Edit: in fact I'm already 3 paragraphs in and so fascinated by the, typical for patio11, high level of detail combined with easy novel like readability, that I almost feel guilty for having piled on to criticize the awful AI image. But still, yeah, I agree AI images like this are actually worse than no illustration at all
- StewardMcOy 3y ago
  Right? That's why I was hesitant to bring this up too. But the picture really is that distracting. Like, the article's good enough that it doesn't need an image. Or if you really think you need it, grab some free stock photo or clipart or something. Or get good AI art. Don't settle for bad AI art.

mito88 3y ago

check or cheque?

cperciva 3y ago
In American English, "check". In British English, "cheque".
- buildsjets 3y ago
  Does one cash a cheque or cache a cheque? A user upthread seems to think it is the latter, and that really bothers me for some reason.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The church was often asked to cache small Czechs following the violent end to the Prague Spring.
  - cperciva 3y ago
    It depends if you're converting it to cash or hiding it in a cache. In most cases you mean the former.
082349872349872 3y ago
Aren't they both obsolete?

johtso 3y ago

I never use cheques, but had a strange cheque related situation a few years ago. For some reason an empty bank account that I never use had gone £100 overdrawn, supposedly due to a cheque that had been cached, and was racking up fees. After hours of phone calls, I learnt that bank account numbers are recycled (!) after accounts are closed.. so the previous owner of my account number had tried to cache a cheque using a legitimate chequebook that they still owned. Still amazes me that the system could be so insecure!

manwe150 3y ago
My understanding is that the other individual has committed several felony crimes to write that check (various forms of banking fraud and theft), and given their signature to it as well, as evidence of both intent and proof of their identity. So it seems to me about as insecure as saying "I can't believe the sidewalks here are so insecure near roads, that a car could just drive down onto them and hit people." The idea is not to make it hard to move money around, but to instead make the punishment very high for trying to cheat the system.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Sometimes relying on deterrence is necessary, but it's surprising to do it when there are seemingly easier ways - like not reusing account numbers.
- cperciva 3y ago
  Given the stated currency, I suspect the bank account in question is in the UK, so the criminal law wouldn't be entirely identical. But in any case, it wasn't necessarily a crime -- someone (especially if elderly or impaired) might have accidentally used the wrong chequebook. It's only a crime to write a cheque on someone else's account if you do it deliberately. To me, the biggest issue here is simply "banks should not recycle account numbers".
- pests 3y ago
  I think this would happen more often with people with many accounts and many checkbooks accidently using the wrong book after closing an account, by accident.

legitster 3y ago

One of my favorite types of establishments here in America is a bar that cashes checks. If you really want to get a sense of how some people radically different than you live their lives, spend some time at the counter after the construction sites close for the day and people stumble in with their day's pay. I nodded along whole-heartedly into the digression on banking and class in America. When you actually think about what's going on in these places, it's a wonderfully curious twist on our idea of "trustworthiness".

gosub100 3y ago
In Nevada, casinos will cash your checks for you.

rtpg 3y ago

> And so by presenting your check, which you think is substantially terminating a transaction, you are actually creating a new credit extension with your bank. They are extremely aware that you just asked them to advance you money, even if you are not aware that you did that. They already partially underwrote this extension of credit; that is why you were not shooed out of the building when you originally asked for a checking account. I'm extremely confused about the usage of the word "need", and the implication that this need for the line of credit is what generates all these downstream problems. The person depositing a check wants the money soon, sure. And the check bouncing or not depends on the person writing the check. The person depositing the check "should" "just wait"? Like don't extend the credit? Credit card processors hold onto your money for this exact sort of reason! Yes, there are trust considerations. But don't move money that is not quasi-guaranteed? Pay for money flow? Make the trust relationship between banks and not between atomic actors? Risks are risks are risks but saying that people should be unbanked because their checks will bounce... I guess it's weird to have these pieces of paper have so much trust associated to them in the first place? Maybe the check network doesn't work as well in this model. Fraud is a whole thing as well of course. I guess in this model people trust checks enough to allow groceries to be paid by check. Just feels extremely suboptimal.

twiss 3y ago
The word "need" does not appear in the quote :') I think the author is just describing how it typically works rather than how it needs to work.
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bombcar 3y ago
You can ask the bank to hold the funds until final clearance - which can be quite long. Weeks or more. Often if you really need to do that, you’re better off taking the check the bank it was drawn on, often having to open an account there first. Still can take quite awhile. But before computers and electric communication, this was the best and fastest way, and since the vast majority of transactions are legitimate, it works. Pratchett’s Going Postal is a decent look at the system.

anon-sre-srm 3y ago

Rationalizing different degrees of predatory banking is still being a bottom feeder. This is why USPS should become a credit union anyone can use.

ambigious7777 3y ago
(non-american here) Huh? Why? Isn't the USPS a mail company? I don't get what that has to do with banking.
- tw04 3y ago
  Because there are branches everywhere in the US making access easy whether you’re in New York or Montana. There’s no other department of the federal government with that coverage. They also are quasi financial already as you can get a USPS money order.
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- anon-sre-srm 3y ago
  I guess you haven't traveled much. Post offices in other countries also provide fundamental banking services. Right now, one can get money orders from USPS.
- unmole 3y ago
  It's fairly common for postal systems to provide basic banking services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
- curtisf 3y ago
  The USPS is a government agency that already has physical branches in almost every community in the US, which would make it an extremely accessible bank for the 4.5% or so of households who currently don't have a bank. It could also be pressure on American banks to treat their customers better, since the USPS is not burdened with a responsibility to generate dividends for shareholders. The USPS is also not directly funded by taxes (though it is indirectly subsidized via it's tax status and sole right of access to mailboxes), and with the waning popularity of letter mail, would become more self sufficient in the long term if it branched out into other services Other countries also combine banking and postal branches for similar reasons, like Japan (although it is in the process of being privatized).

slavboj 3y ago

Patrick does not mention that a primary reason even the "banked" use check cashing services is that deposited funds are trivially legible for the purposes of attaching court judgements, particularly child support. Cash is far more difficult to trace.

conductr 3y ago
How so? The court issues wage garnishments, it gets taken out of the check directly. This might help people paid under the table or in checks from clients but I think that’s a small cohort.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  I have no experience with this but my understanding is that they don’t go straight to wage garnishes (which I’ve heard the bureaucracy is slow to handle in situations where the garnished individual moves). That happens if you don’t meet payments as required.
willvarfar 3y ago
The visibility would also come from paying child support via any kind of bank transfer? It's only the cash that is difficult to trace (and requires people to actually meet, which seems another big downside in the child support payment scenario).
p_l 3y ago
At least in poland, the standard measure from simplest payments to settling overdue debt between companies or to government, is "bank confirmation" - a printout/pdf from a bank declaring that a transaction with those details was made at this time.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

To a German, where checks never were a thing, because we moved to wire transfer at the beginning of the 20th century, this is amazing.

qb 3y ago
I have received checks in Germany in the last decade, specifically when a health insurer refunded premiums but did not have bank details on file for me.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  Sorry, not a native English speaker, probably missused "not a thing". I thought it would mean "not important" or "not something people use all the time" or "irrelevant".
  - mercutio2 3y ago
    You wanted “not common”, sounds like. “Not a thing” is a confusing idiom. It specifically means never happens, ever, but the idiom is frequently used in contexts where hyperbole is expected, so a literal translation accounting for the hyperbole might be something more like “I’ve seen it once, but it’s vanishingly rare”.
odiroot 3y ago
Techniker Krankenkasse still sends paper cheques. I wouldn't consider Germany to be avant-garde of banking in any sense.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
I am happy for you that you live in the blissful ignorance of thinking checks aren't a thing in Germany. You will curse the day you discover you're wrong. They are exceptionally rare, to the point where many people have never seen one and fintech/neobanks simply don't support them at all. Unfortunately, some organizations/businesses do use them. They're particularly popular when some entity is required to pay you, knows your postal address, doesn't know your bank account, and doesn't care about your satisfaction with them. They just mail you a check and are done with it, making it your problem. As a bonus, they have a good chance of not having to actually pay you because you don't want to deal with the check or forget. Of course, there is no electronic deposit either. And while I'm talking about German companies above, US companies of course absolutely love doing this for the same reasons, meaning you have a foreign, USD denominated check. Hopping on a flight to New York and going to one of these check cashing places might be the easiest way to cash these, and could be comparable in cost to trying to do it locally.

cowthulhu 3y ago

> "If you use “kind girl behind the counter” language about the 0.01% most aggravating customer once, you will not be a bank teller tomorrow. So bank tellers basically never use those words, and instead can inflect “Can I help you, sir?” in a way which leaves absolutely no doubt as to how welcome the new arrival to the branch is." I found myself nodding along to a lot of the contents of this article, but I totally disagree with this part... it runs totally counter to my experience. To be fair, maybe my experience was the exception that proves the rule (or maybe things have changed since I worked front-line at a financial institution), but the expectation that you would be cold or unwelcoming to a customer (or prospective customer) based on class or perceived class was absolutely not the case. Like, I cannot stress that enough. Don't get me wrong, there were procedural safeguards such as "no checking account if you have <650 FICO", but you were expected to be welcoming to everyone who walked in the door and "they seemed poor" would certainly not be an acceptable excuse for snubbing a customer.

jstanley 3y ago
The point isn't to directly "snub" the customer, but to talk to them in a formal, professional, superficially polite way that the kind of customer you don't want does not find welcoming, because in their normal life they do not encounter it.
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chefandy 3y ago

The article it’s well built and the author is knowledgeable about the business side of check cashing, but as soon as I saw the title graphic, I thought “oh boy, here we go.” I assume the author had the best intentions and I acknowledge the somewhat tongue-in-cheek style, but the soigné tone and the assumption that the topic is alien to and deeply beneath anyone reading the article is obnoxious. Check cashing places were an important part of my scrappier younger-adult years— cultural rifts like this have always kept me from being truly socially comfortable among a big chunk of the tech crowd no matter how much noise they make about inclusivity.

mdekkers 3y ago
The DALL-E generated hero image is terrible, and the tone of the article is beyond patronising, I couldn’t get past the “money transfer between banks is magic”.
- badgersnake 3y ago
  That’s a misquote. The author says to assume that it is magic and the reason for that is that it’s not the topic of the blog post. This makes complete sense to me since the article is long enough already.
  - mdekkers 3y ago
    It’s just one example of the insufferably patronising tone of the article. Just stating that a bank transfer happens is enough. No need to assume anything. Making the assumption that an explanation is required is totally unnecessary.
eru 3y ago
From the article: > One of the reasons I covered the checks as a payment method recently was to lay the groundwork for talking about some of the fascinating alternative financial world around them. In the main, this helps people at the socioeconomic margins turn payroll and other checks into cash (or otherwise immediately spendable value) in return for a fee. This is not how you, reader, probably deal with checks, and the existence of this industry / product have been controversial for many years. So what's funny is that the topic is actually totally alien to me. But that's because I have only ever dealt with one or two checks in my life (when interacting with an American company paying interview expenses). And otherwise, I've never handled them at all. They just have been out-of-use in my parts of the world (Europe, Singapore, Australia) for at least as long as I've been economically active in them. From what I've heard, the US is going in that direction as well? So many younger people would have never handled checks there either? But the paragraph just assumes that you would be familiar with checks in general, but not with check cashing. (Later on in the article, our author explains the basics of how well-enough-off people handle checks. So that's fine.) Edit: reading further down, I'm ok with the tone of the article and don't share the concerns.

webninja 3y ago

The people using these check cashing services often have someone taking money out of their bank account — hence why they don’t/can’t use one.

redsoundbanner 3y ago
[flagged]
- ozfive 3y ago
  I find it ironic that your truth is delivered with the cowardice of a throwaway account. Essentially don't write a check with your mouth your rear-end can't cash. CashApp me at my username if you agree. All proceeds go to student loan repayment.

Scoundreller 3y ago

One thing I like about Canada is that you can take any federal government cheque into any bank branch with ID and by law they have to cash it for you for free. Account or not.

StayTrue 3y ago
Never heard of this so I looked it up [0]. I was a poor student working for the federal government and always had hold periods on physical paycheques deposited in person. Once or twice it was a hassle. I guess one would have to know their rights and be prepared to assert them. [0] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/banking/cashing-government-cheque.html https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

Animats 3y ago

This is more about how it used to work. Now, there's a whole industry devoted to getting in between employers and employees and siphoning off fees. First, there's the "pay by depositing to a debit card" racket.[1] "The biggest issue is the hidden fees. Some providers charge cardholders for common activities such as receiving paper statements, over-drafting, replacing cards, transferring money to another account, making withdrawals at most ATMs, and even not using the card for a period of time." Then, there are things such as DailyPay.[2] This combines payroll, a debit card, and payday loans into one convenient fee-laden package.[3] Worse, not getting paid means trying to reach the intermediary's customer support. [1] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-are-payroll-debit-cards-2062769 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-are-payroll-debit-cards... [2] https://www.dailypay.com/ https://www.dailypay.com/ [3] https://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/daily_pay_services.html https://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/daily_pay_services....

eru 3y ago

> That is certainly not the only pathway to being non-banked, but it is an extremely common one. Often, consumers self-select out because they try banking for a while and then repeatedly get assessed high fees which they do not feel are legitimate, such as fees for overdrafting their accounts. To bang a very old drum, the decision to move from everyone-pays-a-Netflix-subscription-for-banking to banking-is-free-except-we-assess-high-fees-if-you-screw-up created winners and losers. We called that one "free checking." Descriptively it subsidizes the middle class by using fees assessed stochastically to people in persistent economic precarity. In particular, young members of the middle class (college students and recent graduates in their least-well-off years) benefitted a lot. Though I wonder whether you could just get an account where your deposited checks just take a while to clear (when the bank actually has the money)? And where any attempt at overdrafting would just fail? Basically, a bank account where the bank does not extend you credit. A purely 'pre-paid' affair. I guess the kinds of people who would want these accounts are on average not good customers? (I know that they have these kinds of accounts in eg Germany where I grew up. But your average German is averse to taking on debt; so you just get average Germans signing up, instead of the adverse selection you'd have in the US?)

gambiting 3y ago
>>Basically, a bank account where the bank does not extend you credit. A purely 'pre-paid' affair. That's like......every normal bank account? At least in Poland, UK and Germany(as you mentioned). By default you don't get any overdraft, you can't go below zero so to speak. If you do(with an offline transaction that wasn't authorized live with the bank) then usually you get 24 hours to pay it off and start paying heavy penalties beyond that point.
- paulmd 3y ago
  that is precisely what “overdraft fees” means
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    Britain does have a "basic account", usually used by people with debt problems. It has no unarranged overdraft facility. Example: https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/basic-account/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/basic-account/ I assume the debit card is configured to refuse offline transactions.

bernardlunn 3y ago

Business should not pay by check - only in America is this technical debt so prevalent. Cash or payment into bank account please

quickthrower2 3y ago
I have been working since 1996 and never been paid by cheque. I find cheques very annoying to deal with. Usually get them on some edge case like a government refund but it has been years since that even. The other rare case is a bank cheque for a deposit for buying a house etc. Although I bet that is rare now just do an instant bank transfer. I do vaguely remember the 80s and there was a fair bit of cheque usage along with those credit card duplicator things where the sales person takes an imprint of the card. Wild times!
astrange 3y ago
What if the business doesn't know your bank account prior to payment and neither of you want them to know it? (Imagine a business that occasionally mails random people $10.48 without asking them first.)

rkagerer 3y ago

I did a lot of work on remote deposit when Check 21 came out (the legislation that paved the way for images of checks to be used in place of the paper monetary instrument). It's crazy what occasionally got passed through. I remember a VP complaining about a failed deposit - the cheque image was a completely unintelligible scrawl of blocky black pixels - like white noise on an old TV. I explained why it got flagged by the software and that it wasn't eligible for deposit. They didn't care - uploaded it to the bank who happily cleared it for them with funds available instantly. It's all about how big a customer you are, you're perceived risk profile and your relationship with the bank.

JustLurking2022 3y ago

Honestly, the article rambled & ranted as much as it informed. TL;DR: Check cashing exists because banks don't want to deal with people who deposit checks with a high risk profile (whether due to fraud or lack of funds by the payer). Unsurprisingly, this risk gets priced into the product. Dealing with bounced checks from such people often involves behavior that most of a bank's customers would consider somewhere between impolite and disturbing. Also, many consumers of check cashing do not have state issued IDs and may not be up for dealing with KYC checks. The situation has gotten somewhat better for low income people in that government benefits are delivered electronically, without needing to cash a check and some emerging electronic payment options may improve it further.

chiph 3y ago

How well known you are to the bank matters. My grandfather was a builder and if he didn't have his checkbook on him, he would pay a subcontractor via a check written on whatever piece of scrap wood was around. The local bank had no problem with depositing it because he'd done it many times before and he had a good reputation in town. Many of the rules and regulations have come about because writing checks became a non-local thing. You'd send off a check to pay for a magazine subscription and it'd get processed somewhere far away, like South Dakota. They don't know who you are, so like the article said - writing a check became an extension of credit, and the writer needed some verification as to their creditworthiness.

throwaway2037 3y ago
Woah, what year? How can this be legal?
- chiph 3y ago
  This was the late 1930's so quite long ago. Pretty much every bank now has policies that would cause them to seriously object to a roof shingle being used as a check. So not illegal - just very unlikely to be accepted. Could you create your own paper checks? I think you can, as long as it looks/feels like a check and has all the info on it in the correct places. You don't have to use any security features to prevent check washing (but it's a good idea). You don't even need the magnetic ink, as the check will be optically scanned, with hand-processing as a fallback (they will attach a MICR correction strip). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

I think the article glosses over the fraud aspect a lot. I would expect these places to be prime targets for all kinds of fraud. I'm surprised personal checks are accepted at all and (if the example in the article is realistic) so cheaply. They have to manage that somehow beyond a reputation system. Part of it might be the legal system - I believe check fraud is seen as more serious, with much higher penalties, in many countries, specifically because the system of checks wouldn't work without it.

aftbit 3y ago

Honestly this is a bit crazy to me. Why does processing a check require an extension of credit here in 2024? Why can't the banks validate the check and transfer the money while you wait a few seconds at the teller window? All of the alternative fintech solutions can do that. The prepaid debit cards that unbanked people use instead can do that. Heck, even the blockchain can do it, for way too much money. Sure, back in the day of couriers carrying checks, it made sense that it might take a few days to know. Today, with the internet and electronic presentment, theoretically the whole system could be transparently replaced with one that can clear the vast majority of checks in seconds. Banks could offer checking accounts to even the least creditworthy people simply by not extending them any credit.

jldugger 3y ago
> in 2024? Why can't the banks validate the check and transfer the money while you wait a few seconds at the teller window? In late 2023 FedNow was introduced, which should facilitate exactly that. But it's optional for banking institutions, and the US is riddled with small institutions that cannot or will not volunteer their capital to invest in the tech required.

astrange 3y ago

I think the way patio11 writes about poor people comes off more classist than if he just called them shiftless criminals instead of repeatedly being extremely overtly nice about them while also saying they can't do anything right, can't interact with any bureaucracy successfully and don't know how to cook. Besides that, I don't think they actually eat at McDonald's much. Their relationship with fast food is that they work there.

aaroninsf 3y ago

FTA: "it’s really hard to expressively, passionately hate this business and not hate the young lady working in it" Fact check: so false, as to call in question the author's good faith.

colinsane 3y ago

> Now you shouldn’t expect from me the level of academic rigor associated with scholars at e.g. Harvard; on the Internet, we cite our sources. since you're comfortable making a jab like that, would you mind linking me to specific passages that the Harvard lady failed to cite in her work? the whole scandal is so buried in surface-level coverage that i legitimately cannot figure out what she failed to cite.