10 ms·

Not paying with cash

84 points by mikece 1y ago

bombcar 1y ago
You can pay with "cash" while using cards. Gets some of the advantages - not all.
- hopelite 1y ago
  Maybe read the post before commenting?
- doctoboggan 1y ago
  How can you replicate the anonymity of cash with a card?
  - tossit444 1y ago
    Prepaid debit cards usually do not require identification.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Exactly, or if you care about the credit aspect, debit cards alone. Or if you shop regularly at a given store, reloadable gift cards are a decent substitute. But cash isn’t terribly scary.
superkuh 1y ago
I'll always remember the time when the tourist town of Ely, Minnesota, USA had it's single fiber internet cable cut. Pretty much all the groups there trying to rent canoes, equipment, hotels, etc with corporate cards weren't able to do it. We were lucky our group brought cash. A society depending entirely on corporations for currency function is incredibly fragile in addition to corporate payment services being rent seeking, privacy invading, transaction morality deciding monsters. At least in the USA. Governments should definitely be regulating and requiring those offering paid goods and services to accept cash. And not just for paying debts.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  This seems like the ideal use case for satellite internet like starlink though. Main fiber connection, but a satellite backup. The trend I predict is just more robust redundant connections, not people giving up on cards.
  - frosted-flakes 1y ago
    Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough. The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.
- traeregan 1y ago
  I never thought I’d see Ely mentioned on HN. http://moosebay.com http://moosebay.com is a close family friend who lives in and guides out of Ely. I had a great trip there many years ago. I’ll have to ask them about your story, surely they remember it happening.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  I remember the day I took someone on a date, only to run into a state-wide power outage. We found a restaurant that had gas grills. They couldn't make french fries, because their fry machine was electric. They couldn't make shakes. They were pouring soda from bottles they had bought at a grocery store. They were working by candlelight and adding up the bill on a hand calculator, but they were doing business like crazy. I think they were not doing credit cards, but it was long enough ago that they might have been taking imprints. Certainly today they would not be able to take cards, unless they had battery backup or a generator, since many cards don't have the raised digits any more.
- hedora 1y ago
Shank 1y ago
One thing I really love that Japan got right was the creation of e-money systems that are anonymous (you can get a Suica for 20,000 yen without any registration information), work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal), and are easily accessible (you can get them at any train station, you can charge them at any ATM or convenience store with cash). In contrast, a debit/credit card usually requires a lot more pain to get onboarded with. The closest thing is probably those silly visa prepaid cards you can buy, but they require a little work to use regularly.
- csinode 1y ago
  > work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal) Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?
  - andreareina 1y ago
    It's been in widespread use for a while at this point so in practice probably not. I imagine the authentication keys to present as a card are very tightly controlled and not just anyone can become a provider.
  - Shank 1y ago
    > Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks? FeliCa uses mutual authentication with eventual bookkeeping and sync. I believe that there are some theoretical attacks on older cards but the terminals are regularly synchronized and get a ban list. In-practice, you’ll also be reported to the police, probably.
  - lmm 1y ago
    Not really - what's the attack? You could maybe somehow clone a card with a balance on it and spend that balance twice, if you can figure out that a particular terminal is offline (or have a way to take it offline), but how do you turn that into an attack that you can scale enough to cover the fixed costs? You're not getting your own terminal without a contract and due diligence on your company, so you can't really pull off an attack that needs to control both sides.
kshahkshah 1y ago
The big benefit is tipping in cash. Buys a lot of good will… and free drinks
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- arealaccount 1y ago
  And in the flip side not being pressured to tip on things you wouldn’t normally tip for via toast machine
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
The paragraph about the inconvenience of cash resonates with me. It’s a pain to manage and easy to lose or get stolen. At least if I drop my wallet full of cards, in a couple of calls any fraudulent transactions will be voided and the cards turned useless, but stolen cash is just gone. That’s not to discount its upsides but its downsides shouldn’t be handwaived away either.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  I've never had physical cash get stolen, but multiple times I've had to get new credit card numbers, because mine was revealed in a data breach. Even if I had been robbed, the cash I have on hand is a fraction of a percent of either my credit limit or bank account balance. I'm only near a few dozen people per day at most, and the chances of one of them trying to rob me are near zero, and the most they could get is a fraction of what they could access through a stolen card number. Meanwhile, there's constant attempts for data breaches at payment processors and those they work with, so my chances of being harmed by a data breach are much higher than by a robbery. Also, you are paying insurance premiums for those voided transactions. Vendors are chanrged around 3% for card transactions, and they pass that on to the customer, although some only pass it to their card customers, with a surcharge for card transaction.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    Not only data breaches, but people skimming or copying the card. I went to a restaurant a while ago and some random employee decided to grab our bill to “help out”, not our waitress. I was splitting the bill with someone else and both our cards had fraudulent charges in the following days. I still find it crazy that we let waitstaff walk away with our cards in the US. One of my cards is very thick and metal. I found that one had fraud on it at a much higher rate than any of the plastic cards I’ve had. It was heavy to the point that it would get comments from about 40% of the people I handed it to. I can only theorize, but my guess is that card signaled a higher value and was more likely to draw the attention of someone who may care to go on a spending spree. While I can report the issues and get a refund and a new card, it was always a real hassle. Since I stopped carrying that card and use it exclusively online, I don’t think I’ve had a single incident in several years. I used to have it happen about once per quarter.
gedy 1y ago
I buy any fast food with cash. I don't need a helpful Insurance company data mining my habits.
marssaxman 1y ago
I got irritated with the profusion of "no cash accepted" signs a few years back and started making a point of always carrying cash, to use whenever practical. I don't take it to an extreme, but I also don't want to live in a world where every transaction is trackable and all commerce is regulated by Visa, Mastercard, Apple, or Google.
- rolph 1y ago
  i think anyone seeing very many piles of merchandise abandoned at checkout would be wise to review such decisions. it would definately be a failure to consider area demographic
  - bruce511 1y ago
    Yes, I'm sure it varies by area. But from a business point if view, cash is super expensive to deal with. As a side-effect of an acquisition we inherited a small number of customers that paid in cash. Turns out it's expensive to bank that cash, it's a security risk, it's a risk to the person transporting it and so on. In the general case, if most sales are already by card, the marginal gains of cash transactions are consumed by the cost of dealing with the cash. I'm not saying stores should be cashless, but it's worth understanding that accepting cash is very much "not free".
    - al_borland 1y ago
      How does that cost of accepting cash compare to the interchange fees? I’ve heard business owners say interchange fees were their single largest expense after payroll. I’ve also gotten discounts on large purchases for paying “cash” (check). They effectively deducted the interchange fee from my bill. If cash was so expensive to process, they wouldn’t be doing this.
      - bruce511 1y ago
        Again it'll vary by area. For us the cash was a lot more expensive. (Banks charge to deposit cash, and many of our bank branches don't accept cash anyway, so we have to go a bit further.) Fortunately it was little enough that we didn't need a cash-transit vehicle, and it didn't affect our insurance. Yes, I expect some merchants offer a cash discount, and that can add up for large purchases. But I'd prefer not to be carrying large amounts of cash. (We haven't had checks here for probably 15 years or so.) We have a very efficient (and cheap) direct deposit system though, so I can pay via my phone straight from my bank app for a very nominal flat fee. So for large transactions that's akin to a cash discount.
throwaway22032 1y ago
Budgeting with the data trail of a card is significantly easier if you have a lot of transactions. It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives. Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.
- theamk 1y ago
  We improve our life with technology all the time. Electric lights, refrigerator, AC, washing machine, dishwasher, electric toothbrush... Nothing "child-like" in trying to make your life better, even in small ways.
  - throwaway22032 1y ago
    Sure. I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead. It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      Why would I care about how I pay for things though? You're the one saying I should value some particular method over others. But the reality is I don't care at all: I'm trying to buy milk and go home.
      - throwaway22032 1y ago
        Because there are significant privacy benefits and benefits in removing the middlemen etc. If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.
- beeflet 1y ago
  The necessity of making change is major usability/privacy/fungibility roadblock that shows up in more than just cash. For example, it presents a problem for chaumian e-cash or other private money systems like pre-MLSAG monero. If it's possible to do the equivalent of cash, but with some sort of smartcards that exchange some sort of offline zero-knowlege proofs, then that would be preferable over physical cash, because it could eliminate the need for change or marked bills and it would be even more private.
brettp 1y ago
Australian here, like the author. Apple Pay (and equivalents) work _everywhere_ here, including at the tiniest market stalls, and for the smallest purchases. I stopped carrying my wallet the moment my driver licence was available on my phone, the last piece of plastic I was mandated to carry around. While the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.
- rolph 1y ago
  where is that market ? thats exactly my prefered method of commerce.
- ausssssie 1y ago
  Yes everywhere. Car parks. Schools. Cafes. Antique shop in a quaint village. The only cash only places are really just trying to evade tax, or are some 50 year old business refusing to keep up out of stubbornness. And now we rarely have the "it wont connect lets try again it takes 2 minutes" dance of 10 years ago.
spankalee 1y ago
The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards! Credit card processors charge large fees on transactions, which is a huge tax on just about... everything. You can make a lot of that tax back via rewards. And not every card user has a good rewards-paying card - it's usually the more rich that do - so rewards function as a wealth transfer from the less rich to the more rich. Very few stores have lower prices for cash, and processors try to ban that via their contracts when they can. If you pay with cash you pay the higher price to cover the credit card fees anyway, so you're just subsidizing the rewards earners. Might as well recoup some of that yourself.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards! In my observation being that much incentivized by the reward system seems to be a very US-American thing. In Germany, I have never heard anybody seriously talking about that they love the reward system of their credit card. I would claim that at most some (but I think rather few) people in Germany consider some very specific reward that their credit card has as a slight convenience - but nothing more.
  - seabass-labrax 1y ago
    This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees - is one of the primary motivations behind the development of Wero[1]. For those that haven't come across it yet, it's a new payments system based on 'instant' SEPA wire transfers. It is starting to gain ground now, particularly in Germany and the Benelux. I'm not aware of any smartcard-based implementations yet, though - currently it functions more like WeChat typically does, where you need to authorize the transaction on a smartphone. [1]: https://wero-wallet.eu/ https://wero-wallet.eu/
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      > This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees... Money isn't sent to the USA. It is sent to the banks that own your particular credit card. Many of these are certainly in the USA, but your statement makes it sound somehow patriotic/anti-USA to avoid using credit cards.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> So why do I continue using cards? For the same reason you probably do: convenience. Quite the opposite: when using some electronic payment method, I better make careful notes of each transaction so that I can detect whether some fraud happened (which happens for basically every method of digital payment). On the other hand, for cash this is much less necessary.
supportengineer 1y ago
If you like to travel, you can essentially travel "for free" by simply doing these two things: 1. Put all of your purchases on the travel rewards card 2. Pay it off in full every month, no exceptions
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  What do you mean by "for free"? Would you be paying for your travels in full, the next month?
  - crooked-v 1y ago
    I think it's a reference to awards miles/points... but that's definitely not "for free", you're paying for it with the 2%-3% markup imposed by the merchant processing companies and at the baseline just getting that same amount back on the other side. With that said, with some careful finagling you can get outsized value out of it, especially for flight or hotel upgrades.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      It is free because dealing with cash costs the merchant even more than the 3% fees the card costs. If there is a discount for cash it is because they have not counted the costs which are not obvious
      - dlcarrier 1y ago
        It costs a few hondred a month for a cash delivery service. Even if you're only handling a few thousand dollars a day in cash, that's still only around a 1% cost. For most stores, it's probably a fraction of that. Other than that, it's just a few minutes of time to close out the register, which is the one thing employees do reliably quickly, because they get to go home afterward. For people running a little mom-and-pop business, delivery costs could add up, but they are likely to be in a more-time-than-money situation, and make bank runs on the way to or from the business. There's also a lot less liability, because counterfeit money is easy to detect, and there aren't any fees or losses from stolen cards or chargebacks.
neilv 1y ago
Buried. Remember to upvote if you comment. 124. Not Paying with Cash (rubenerd.com) 20 points by mikece 1 hour ago | flag | hide | 40 comments
cyberax 1y ago
> I always get a chuckle from people saying you shouldn’t use loyalty cards in grocery stores and the like… when they pay with credit cards! Stores aren't allowed to use credit cards to track purchases or to link customers to loyalty programs. That's why you need to use a separate loyalty card, or a store-branded credit card.
- iwanttocomment 1y ago
  Here in the US, it's absolutely allowed. Walmart, for example, will by default add in-store purchases using a credit card (and no other identifying information) to the purchase history on a Walmart.com account set up with the same credit card. You can only disable this tracking by going into Account > Settings > Privacy > Data Sharing in your Walmart.com account, where you'll find an option that states "Allow us to automatically add store purchases to your purchase history using credit card."
  - cyberax 1y ago
    That's because you allowed Walmart to do that when you signed for the account. It's buried somewhere in the ToS. They are not allowed to track you when you don't _have_ an account. With Apple Pay or Android Pay they won't even be able to do that because they get anonymous tokens and not the card number.
    - iwanttocomment 1y ago
      The Walmart/Walmart.com TOS and Privacy Policy documents only say: > We collect your personal information from technology we use in and outside of our stores. For example, our point-of-sale terminals process your credit card information when you complete your purchase [...] Which is pretty obvious. Nothing about them explicitly tracking in-store purchase history via credit card numbers, which as above, they certainly do and allow you to disable in your account settings. As another example, southern grocer H-E-B is famous for not having loyalty cards and tracking in-store customer behaviors via credit card number, regardless of whether you have an HEB.com account. They then sell that data to vendors. [0] This NYT article from several years ago verifies that Target ties all credit card purchases to a unique "guest ID". [1] Can you cite the US federal regulation or Visa/Mastercard TOS that prohibits tracking customer purchase behavior by credit card number without consent? There may be state or local statutes I'm unaware of, but I'm confident there's nothing on a country-wide level. You are absolutely correct that Apple Pay and Android Pay do not allow tracking in this manner due to anonymous tokenizing. But that's nothing new - going back to the subject of the article, tracking generally isn't possible with cash transactions as well. [0] https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-customer-data-for-purchase-through-circana/ https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-custo... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
rubatuga 1y ago
Great for bargaining and getting cash discounts. Have extra coins? Tips are appreciated.
lisbbb 1y ago
The main problem I have with cash is that we don't have denominations large enough to buy much these days thanks to inflation. The $100 is the new $20, but ATMs won't serve $100s. I buy gas for my car, it's at least $35 right there. Groceries run $80-$120 every trip now. I don't know if revaluation is possible, but we need it. I'm not worried about dirty cash as compared to every purchase being tracked and all the fees for using services like Venmo or whatever exchange service du jour, and they all apply their petty moralizing. It's not the way forward if you value freedom and privacy.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  My banks ATM defaults to $100 bills, and it takes a bunch of taps to get only $20 bills.
  - ProllyInfamous 1y ago
    My local credit union has switched entirely to machined staff, even inside locations (with attendant staff for transaction impossible via ATM). For some silly reason, the machine stocks only these bills: $5$ $20$ $100$ Why waste an entire cash dispenser on fives when it could instead be handing out fifties (or at least tens)... especially at an ATM!? I think it's time for a $1000 bill, again. Let's get rid of bills less than $10$ (coins instead); also, get rid of pennies [in progress] and nickels. Leaving only: dimes*, quarters, halves, dollar [coin], $2 & $5 [coins], $10$ $20$ $50$ $100$ $1000$ [bills] *I'd suggest nix'ing this one, too, if it were physically larger [but isn't] I only stock my wallet with $100$ $50$ $10$ $2$ [bills], and immediately get rid of ones ($1$) when possible. I do not have any credit cards.
    - s5300 1y ago
      >> Why waste an entire cash dispenser on fives when it could instead be handing out fifties (or at least tens)... especially at an ATM!? Hacker News user unaware Poor People^tm exist
      - ProllyInfamous 1y ago
petermcneeley 1y ago
No worries, just be careful which protests you attend.
etbebl 1y ago
How milquetoast... "Young people want to pay with cash more, and there might be interesting reasons for that, but ehh cards are convenient and cash is gross so still no cash for me!" What's the point of this?
temptemptemp111 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jppope 1y ago
I prefer cash, not for the reasons mentioned. First, cash makes me really think about what I'm buying. It doesn't poke you the same way when you tap a card... which is obviously one of the main reasons they want you do use cards. When I use cash, I am reminded of when I didn't have a lot, which keeps me from spending without thought. Next, its a hallmark of the middle class to spend money that you don't have. Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance... I do not want to be one of those people. When you use cash, its stupidly easy to know if you have the money or not. Its also easier to do social activities when you have cash. Need to split a tab, here's the money. I'll buy the next round, heres the cash. Also, it may just be me but keeping a decent stack of bills is like a little pat on the back for the hard work. Its a reminder that hard work pays off, which I can see when I buy a coffee, or some bread or something. Reasons why I don't like cash: family members tend to treat my wallet like an ATM. Lastly, if you want to make some people feel good (e.g. servers, bartenders, etc) tip them with $2 bills
- whycome 1y ago
  $2 bills?? You’re gonna get the occasional one who thinks you’re scamming them. It’s crazy that Canada, being so similar to the US, got rid of the 1 and 2 like 30 years ago.
  - crooked-v 1y ago
    It seems to be much less common these days (probably because smartphones make it easier to look things up), but there are assorted news stories about people being accused of counterfeiting or even arrested for trying to pay for things with $2 bills.
  - homefree 1y ago
    I had a funny experience with a French cheese shop in SF for this - I tipped a $2 bill and he called me back in confused thinking it was fake, but was good natured when I showed him it was real.
    - 1y ago
Gathering6678 1y ago
I was surprised to know recently that, in France apparently, there are quite a lot of shops that don't accept cash. I thought it was going to be the other way around: shops stipulating "cash only". In my country, there are actually regulations mandating the acceptance of cash (unless it's an unmanned booth or certain vendoring machines, if I remember correctly).
- frm88 1y ago
  You can protest this, since it's illegal: all stores in France must accept cash https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-of-payment/national-cash-management-policy/acceptability#:~:text=Cash%20is%20legal%20tender%20in,how%20they%20wish%20to%20pay. https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-of-p...
jojobas 1y ago
Of all things, rejecting cash because it's a social construct is a bit unexpected.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  The linked article "Do you not like money" gives a bit better explanation. It's not just cash, but all kinds of money that are an "odd, and mildly dystopian" social construct. The Culture has a proverb, "money is a sign of poverty".
singpolyma3 1y ago
Cash is honestly the worst. I've boycotted cash only places most of my life and have never carried cash as an adult. It was may e the best we could do in history but it serves no purpose now.
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  Privacy.
TheAlchemist 1y ago
One additional feature for paying in cash, is from the business side - a lot of small businesses declare only a part of what's paid in cash, and the rest is kept 'tax free'. While it breaks the law, I kind of feel sympathetic to it, given how much the law tends to advantage big companies.
- gghffguhvc 1y ago
  Paying tax isn’t a big company vs small company thing. A single company not paying tax isn’t that bad directly but it can be infectious. “They don’t pay neither should I” attitude is a problem.
  - TheAlchemist 1y ago
    I know, but then you look at effective tax paid by big companies and it makes you wonder.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  This is more important for tips. If you pay a tip by card, the tipped worker will have to declare the full value of the tip as income. If you pay by cash, they are supposed to declare the full value of the tip as income, but what's actually reported by the business to the IRS is 15% of sales. Any cash tips over that amount you can probably get away with not reporting.
dartharva 1y ago
I started abandoning cash around a decade ago, and have steadily moved to mobile-only payments for the past five years (India has ubiquitous instant bank-to-bank transfers through mobile payment platforms). Not having to carry your wallet around and make trips to ATMs is rather convenient, but in aggregate, I'll still NOT recommend this. I realize I have ended up spending several times I would have had I stuck to cash. There seems to be a psychological aspect that makes you keep track subconsciously of how much you are spending when you have to physically draw cash. With mobile payments? It's just scan a code and forget about it. I am planning to stop by the end of this year.
FriedPickles 1y ago
Contactless Bitcoin lightning payments. Best of both worlds.
- seany 1y ago
  Monero would be ideal
- politelemon 1y ago
  It would be useful if bitcoin were treated as a currency and not an investment vehicle. It's too late now.
paulgerhardt 1y ago
> Cash is also—I regret to say—disgusting. Not true! For a while I was manufacturing cash and did some research on the hygiene component. Surprisingly, I learned tap to pay was the most hygienic iff one didn’t use a common terminal for tips or signing. Coins were the second most hygienic with a germ score of 168RLU . Cash third. Credit fourth, and dead last was shared payment terminals one physically touched (this includes tap to pay if one “answers a couple of questions.”) A separate study found smart watches were dirtier than terminals. [1] https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is-the-least-hygienic-payment-method/ https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is... [2] https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/ https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/ [3] https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-global-health-and-the-environment/ https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-glo... And amusingly [4] https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-average-contain-over-26000-bacteria-2/ https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-a... Reports in this space are full of confirmation bias so take the RLU scores with a grain of salt. Likewise some cultures have cleaner methods of dealing with cash than others.
noduerme 1y ago
I'm very sympathetic to both the cash-as-privacy and cash-as-fair-access (for unbanked people, to goods and services) arguments, and I won't support any business that doesn't take cash. Credit cards are a snare for the chronically indebted, to shake pennies from their pockets to transfer to the wealthy. However, if you have no debt (which is enough to be considered "wealthy", IMO), you'd be a fool not to use a credit card for most transactions. Because the rewards they hand out are built into the prices paid for everything by people who pay with cash. In my own case... I got my first credit card at 18, and by the time I was 22 I had racked up $20k in debt. I took drastic action and stopped using cards completely, and lived only on my income from multiple jobs, going without anything I wanted to buy for several years. Beans, rice, pasta, one pair of shoes, three shirts. Until I paid it off. By the time I was 24 I had paid it off waiting tables, driving taxi. Then I cancelled my cards. And so for reasons unrelated to privacy, I had no credit cards for 15 years after that, and only used cash or debit cards. It was only in my mid thirties that I was put wise to the fact that I was losing 1% to 3% of my average spend by not having a card. So I got the most expensive card I could with the best payback ratio, and have never carried a balance on it at the end of a month. Over the ten years I've had it, it's paid me back somewhere around $30k, all siphoned from the pockets of people who don't pay their debt off. Is this a vile and rapacious system? Absolutely. Would I be stupid not to take advantage of it after doing my time and learning the hard way? Yeah. I still pay cash a lot, because I don't need a record of what I'm up to. And I'd support a ban on credit cards which would lead to merchants dropping prices for everyone. But here we are.
- limagnolia 1y ago
  Most if not all of those rewards are paid for by the interchange that they charge merchants, not the interest they charge customers. Of course, interest and fees are also profitable, but banks are pretty happy if you use the card and pay it off every month.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    Really? I guess I didn't realize that. I always felt a kind of "screw you" joy at paying it off completely every month, like I'm getting away with something lol.
daft_pink 1y ago
I really like paying cash at self service restaurants now so I don’t have to deal with their tip screen nonsense.
hackernewsdhsu 1y ago
Cash is privacy. Hope all you card-only cucks get taken by the billionaire class, looking to transfer your wealth to them.
bslaq 1y ago
[flagged]
newscracker 1y ago
I feel there’s very little hope for privacy and freedom if people like the author — who claim to be for privacy and understand the implications of digital payments — choose cards all the time “because it’s convenient”. Convenience and coercion (by the businesses not accepting cash or governments forcing more “cashless”) are what the common person succumbs to. I’m not saying that everyone should switch to cash for everything all the time. But the more that privileged people switch to digital payments and eschew cash, the more difficult it becomes for those who rely on or want to use cash to do so. Choosing privacy could mean a little more (or a lot more, depending on one’s views) inconvenience. Hopefully there are still enough people who use cash and keep cash payments alive for longer (which helps many other people who may not be as privileged or as educated as a different crowd).
bob1029 1y ago
From a business owner perspective, it can be cheaper to operate a card only business than a cash only business, especially if you intend to do it legally and with a proper bank. There is no bank on earth that will service a cash heavy (only) business for free. The cost/risk/fees of moving the physical cash around can be worse than what Visa charges. You could go one step further and think about it from the bank perspective. The cost of physically transacting cash when you could send a packet across the ether to accomplish the same is a wild increase in energy expenditure, etc. Someone had to physically drive to the bank to move the cash. There's no other option. Possibly in a gigantic armored vehicle. Often times multiple times per week. Handling all of this activity is very expensive for all parties involved.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  I often did the cash drop for a local restaurant. It certainly wasn’t free, but having a lackey drop a few thousand in a plastic bag into the night slot was affordable. It’s not quite enough money to worry that it might be stolen regularly. The bank has counting machines and a safe built in the last century as well.
jongjong 1y ago
I hate cash and its digital equivalent. I only use it because I am forced to, against my will, because everyone else has been conditioned into thinking that it has value. Fiat money is the root of all evil. Besides the way it systematically steals wealth from the worker class and gives it to the owner class, there is nothing else to say about it. Many reports have been written about the mechanisms via which the monetary system steals wealth from the working class. I'm tired of linking to them. The conditioning is too strong. Frankly the more this goes on, the more sympathy I feel for the owner class for their contempt for the sheeple. I'm starting to think they are right. People are dumb and evil and should be milked for all they've got. I mostly feel bad for those of us who can see what's going on and are treated the same as the sheeple.
JohnFen 1y ago
I almost never use my card in everyday transactions anymore. I pay with cash probably 90% of the time. For me, this has been an amazingly good thing that has improved my happiness level. Just being able to avoid seeing those damned tip prompts alone is well worth it.
rchaud 1y ago
I don't think touching cash is any more disgusting than opening a door at a public business, holding a rail on a subway or holding the gas nozzle while refilling a car. I find cash to be easier to budget with for discretionary expenses as you can simply see what's left without needing to route expenses through an app.
nunez 1y ago
lol; like dad sneakers, what's old is new again. I did this back in 2014 or so when I was, ironically, more strapped for cash and needed to debug my budget (thanks, student loans!). i stopped because carrying change is annoying as fuck, losing cash is annoying at best and painful at worst, and tracking cash purchases is actually much harder than purchases made on the card. instead, i used my debit card for purchases (couldn't spend beyond my means with it) until my income situation improved. i use one credit card exclusively now (and pay it down at the end of the month). this was before businesses started going card-only post COVID. that's another reason why i wouldn't do this today. (I built a Go-based expense tracker years ago that turns all bank alerts and receipts into, then, transactions in Expensify and, now, rows in Google Sheets. I'm able to track literally every single card transaction I make as well as reconcile purchases with their receipts. this is impossible with cash.)

84 points by mikece 1y ago

bombcar 1y ago

You can pay with "cash" while using cards. Gets some of the advantages - not all.

hopelite 1y ago
Maybe read the post before commenting?
doctoboggan 1y ago
How can you replicate the anonymity of cash with a card?
- tossit444 1y ago
  Prepaid debit cards usually do not require identification.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Exactly, or if you care about the credit aspect, debit cards alone. Or if you shop regularly at a given store, reloadable gift cards are a decent substitute. But cash isn’t terribly scary.

superkuh 1y ago

I'll always remember the time when the tourist town of Ely, Minnesota, USA had it's single fiber internet cable cut. Pretty much all the groups there trying to rent canoes, equipment, hotels, etc with corporate cards weren't able to do it. We were lucky our group brought cash. A society depending entirely on corporations for currency function is incredibly fragile in addition to corporate payment services being rent seeking, privacy invading, transaction morality deciding monsters. At least in the USA. Governments should definitely be regulating and requiring those offering paid goods and services to accept cash. And not just for paying debts.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
This seems like the ideal use case for satellite internet like starlink though. Main fiber connection, but a satellite backup. The trend I predict is just more robust redundant connections, not people giving up on cards.
- frosted-flakes 1y ago
  Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough. The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.
traeregan 1y ago
I never thought I’d see Ely mentioned on HN. http://moosebay.com http://moosebay.com is a close family friend who lives in and guides out of Ely. I had a great trip there many years ago. I’ll have to ask them about your story, surely they remember it happening.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
I remember the day I took someone on a date, only to run into a state-wide power outage. We found a restaurant that had gas grills. They couldn't make french fries, because their fry machine was electric. They couldn't make shakes. They were pouring soda from bottles they had bought at a grocery store. They were working by candlelight and adding up the bill on a hand calculator, but they were doing business like crazy. I think they were not doing credit cards, but it was long enough ago that they might have been taking imprints. Certainly today they would not be able to take cards, unless they had battery backup or a generator, since many cards don't have the raised digits any more.
hedora 1y ago

Shank 1y ago

One thing I really love that Japan got right was the creation of e-money systems that are anonymous (you can get a Suica for 20,000 yen without any registration information), work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal), and are easily accessible (you can get them at any train station, you can charge them at any ATM or convenience store with cash). In contrast, a debit/credit card usually requires a lot more pain to get onboarded with. The closest thing is probably those silly visa prepaid cards you can buy, but they require a little work to use regularly.

csinode 1y ago
> work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal) Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?
- andreareina 1y ago
  It's been in widespread use for a while at this point so in practice probably not. I imagine the authentication keys to present as a card are very tightly controlled and not just anyone can become a provider.
- Shank 1y ago
  > Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks? FeliCa uses mutual authentication with eventual bookkeeping and sync. I believe that there are some theoretical attacks on older cards but the terminals are regularly synchronized and get a ban list. In-practice, you’ll also be reported to the police, probably.
- lmm 1y ago
  Not really - what's the attack? You could maybe somehow clone a card with a balance on it and spend that balance twice, if you can figure out that a particular terminal is offline (or have a way to take it offline), but how do you turn that into an attack that you can scale enough to cover the fixed costs? You're not getting your own terminal without a contract and due diligence on your company, so you can't really pull off an attack that needs to control both sides.

kshahkshah 1y ago

The big benefit is tipping in cash. Buys a lot of good will… and free drinks

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
arealaccount 1y ago
And in the flip side not being pressured to tip on things you wouldn’t normally tip for via toast machine

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

The paragraph about the inconvenience of cash resonates with me. It’s a pain to manage and easy to lose or get stolen. At least if I drop my wallet full of cards, in a couple of calls any fraudulent transactions will be voided and the cards turned useless, but stolen cash is just gone. That’s not to discount its upsides but its downsides shouldn’t be handwaived away either.

dlcarrier 1y ago
I've never had physical cash get stolen, but multiple times I've had to get new credit card numbers, because mine was revealed in a data breach. Even if I had been robbed, the cash I have on hand is a fraction of a percent of either my credit limit or bank account balance. I'm only near a few dozen people per day at most, and the chances of one of them trying to rob me are near zero, and the most they could get is a fraction of what they could access through a stolen card number. Meanwhile, there's constant attempts for data breaches at payment processors and those they work with, so my chances of being harmed by a data breach are much higher than by a robbery. Also, you are paying insurance premiums for those voided transactions. Vendors are chanrged around 3% for card transactions, and they pass that on to the customer, although some only pass it to their card customers, with a surcharge for card transaction.
- al_borland 1y ago
  Not only data breaches, but people skimming or copying the card. I went to a restaurant a while ago and some random employee decided to grab our bill to “help out”, not our waitress. I was splitting the bill with someone else and both our cards had fraudulent charges in the following days. I still find it crazy that we let waitstaff walk away with our cards in the US. One of my cards is very thick and metal. I found that one had fraud on it at a much higher rate than any of the plastic cards I’ve had. It was heavy to the point that it would get comments from about 40% of the people I handed it to. I can only theorize, but my guess is that card signaled a higher value and was more likely to draw the attention of someone who may care to go on a spending spree. While I can report the issues and get a refund and a new card, it was always a real hassle. Since I stopped carrying that card and use it exclusively online, I don’t think I’ve had a single incident in several years. I used to have it happen about once per quarter.

gedy 1y ago

I buy any fast food with cash. I don't need a helpful Insurance company data mining my habits.

marssaxman 1y ago

I got irritated with the profusion of "no cash accepted" signs a few years back and started making a point of always carrying cash, to use whenever practical. I don't take it to an extreme, but I also don't want to live in a world where every transaction is trackable and all commerce is regulated by Visa, Mastercard, Apple, or Google.

rolph 1y ago
i think anyone seeing very many piles of merchandise abandoned at checkout would be wise to review such decisions. it would definately be a failure to consider area demographic
- bruce511 1y ago
  Yes, I'm sure it varies by area. But from a business point if view, cash is super expensive to deal with. As a side-effect of an acquisition we inherited a small number of customers that paid in cash. Turns out it's expensive to bank that cash, it's a security risk, it's a risk to the person transporting it and so on. In the general case, if most sales are already by card, the marginal gains of cash transactions are consumed by the cost of dealing with the cash. I'm not saying stores should be cashless, but it's worth understanding that accepting cash is very much "not free".
  - al_borland 1y ago
    How does that cost of accepting cash compare to the interchange fees? I’ve heard business owners say interchange fees were their single largest expense after payroll. I’ve also gotten discounts on large purchases for paying “cash” (check). They effectively deducted the interchange fee from my bill. If cash was so expensive to process, they wouldn’t be doing this.
    - bruce511 1y ago
      Again it'll vary by area. For us the cash was a lot more expensive. (Banks charge to deposit cash, and many of our bank branches don't accept cash anyway, so we have to go a bit further.) Fortunately it was little enough that we didn't need a cash-transit vehicle, and it didn't affect our insurance. Yes, I expect some merchants offer a cash discount, and that can add up for large purchases. But I'd prefer not to be carrying large amounts of cash. (We haven't had checks here for probably 15 years or so.) We have a very efficient (and cheap) direct deposit system though, so I can pay via my phone straight from my bank app for a very nominal flat fee. So for large transactions that's akin to a cash discount.

throwaway22032 1y ago

Budgeting with the data trail of a card is significantly easier if you have a lot of transactions. It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives. Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.

theamk 1y ago
We improve our life with technology all the time. Electric lights, refrigerator, AC, washing machine, dishwasher, electric toothbrush... Nothing "child-like" in trying to make your life better, even in small ways.
- throwaway22032 1y ago
  Sure. I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead. It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Why would I care about how I pay for things though? You're the one saying I should value some particular method over others. But the reality is I don't care at all: I'm trying to buy milk and go home.
    - throwaway22032 1y ago
      Because there are significant privacy benefits and benefits in removing the middlemen etc. If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.
beeflet 1y ago
The necessity of making change is major usability/privacy/fungibility roadblock that shows up in more than just cash. For example, it presents a problem for chaumian e-cash or other private money systems like pre-MLSAG monero. If it's possible to do the equivalent of cash, but with some sort of smartcards that exchange some sort of offline zero-knowlege proofs, then that would be preferable over physical cash, because it could eliminate the need for change or marked bills and it would be even more private.

brettp 1y ago

Australian here, like the author. Apple Pay (and equivalents) work _everywhere_ here, including at the tiniest market stalls, and for the smallest purchases. I stopped carrying my wallet the moment my driver licence was available on my phone, the last piece of plastic I was mandated to carry around. While the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.

rolph 1y ago
where is that market ? thats exactly my prefered method of commerce.
ausssssie 1y ago
Yes everywhere. Car parks. Schools. Cafes. Antique shop in a quaint village. The only cash only places are really just trying to evade tax, or are some 50 year old business refusing to keep up out of stubbornness. And now we rarely have the "it wont connect lets try again it takes 2 minutes" dance of 10 years ago.

spankalee 1y ago

The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards! Credit card processors charge large fees on transactions, which is a huge tax on just about... everything. You can make a lot of that tax back via rewards. And not every card user has a good rewards-paying card - it's usually the more rich that do - so rewards function as a wealth transfer from the less rich to the more rich. Very few stores have lower prices for cash, and processors try to ban that via their contracts when they can. If you pay with cash you pay the higher price to cover the credit card fees anyway, so you're just subsidizing the rewards earners. Might as well recoup some of that yourself.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards! In my observation being that much incentivized by the reward system seems to be a very US-American thing. In Germany, I have never heard anybody seriously talking about that they love the reward system of their credit card. I would claim that at most some (but I think rather few) people in Germany consider some very specific reward that their credit card has as a slight convenience - but nothing more.
- seabass-labrax 1y ago
  This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees - is one of the primary motivations behind the development of Wero[1]. For those that haven't come across it yet, it's a new payments system based on 'instant' SEPA wire transfers. It is starting to gain ground now, particularly in Germany and the Benelux. I'm not aware of any smartcard-based implementations yet, though - currently it functions more like WeChat typically does, where you need to authorize the transaction on a smartphone. [1]: https://wero-wallet.eu/ https://wero-wallet.eu/
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    > This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees... Money isn't sent to the USA. It is sent to the banks that own your particular credit card. Many of these are certainly in the USA, but your statement makes it sound somehow patriotic/anti-USA to avoid using credit cards.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> So why do I continue using cards? For the same reason you probably do: convenience. Quite the opposite: when using some electronic payment method, I better make careful notes of each transaction so that I can detect whether some fraud happened (which happens for basically every method of digital payment). On the other hand, for cash this is much less necessary.

supportengineer 1y ago

If you like to travel, you can essentially travel "for free" by simply doing these two things: 1. Put all of your purchases on the travel rewards card 2. Pay it off in full every month, no exceptions

dlcarrier 1y ago
What do you mean by "for free"? Would you be paying for your travels in full, the next month?
- crooked-v 1y ago
  I think it's a reference to awards miles/points... but that's definitely not "for free", you're paying for it with the 2%-3% markup imposed by the merchant processing companies and at the baseline just getting that same amount back on the other side. With that said, with some careful finagling you can get outsized value out of it, especially for flight or hotel upgrades.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    It is free because dealing with cash costs the merchant even more than the 3% fees the card costs. If there is a discount for cash it is because they have not counted the costs which are not obvious
    - dlcarrier 1y ago
      It costs a few hondred a month for a cash delivery service. Even if you're only handling a few thousand dollars a day in cash, that's still only around a 1% cost. For most stores, it's probably a fraction of that. Other than that, it's just a few minutes of time to close out the register, which is the one thing employees do reliably quickly, because they get to go home afterward. For people running a little mom-and-pop business, delivery costs could add up, but they are likely to be in a more-time-than-money situation, and make bank runs on the way to or from the business. There's also a lot less liability, because counterfeit money is easy to detect, and there aren't any fees or losses from stolen cards or chargebacks.

neilv 1y ago

Buried. Remember to upvote if you comment. 124. Not Paying with Cash (rubenerd.com) 20 points by mikece 1 hour ago | flag | hide | 40 comments

cyberax 1y ago

> I always get a chuckle from people saying you shouldn’t use loyalty cards in grocery stores and the like… when they pay with credit cards! Stores aren't allowed to use credit cards to track purchases or to link customers to loyalty programs. That's why you need to use a separate loyalty card, or a store-branded credit card.

iwanttocomment 1y ago
Here in the US, it's absolutely allowed. Walmart, for example, will by default add in-store purchases using a credit card (and no other identifying information) to the purchase history on a Walmart.com account set up with the same credit card. You can only disable this tracking by going into Account > Settings > Privacy > Data Sharing in your Walmart.com account, where you'll find an option that states "Allow us to automatically add store purchases to your purchase history using credit card."
- cyberax 1y ago
  That's because you allowed Walmart to do that when you signed for the account. It's buried somewhere in the ToS. They are not allowed to track you when you don't _have_ an account. With Apple Pay or Android Pay they won't even be able to do that because they get anonymous tokens and not the card number.
  - iwanttocomment 1y ago
    The Walmart/Walmart.com TOS and Privacy Policy documents only say: > We collect your personal information from technology we use in and outside of our stores. For example, our point-of-sale terminals process your credit card information when you complete your purchase [...] Which is pretty obvious. Nothing about them explicitly tracking in-store purchase history via credit card numbers, which as above, they certainly do and allow you to disable in your account settings. As another example, southern grocer H-E-B is famous for not having loyalty cards and tracking in-store customer behaviors via credit card number, regardless of whether you have an HEB.com account. They then sell that data to vendors. [0] This NYT article from several years ago verifies that Target ties all credit card purchases to a unique "guest ID". [1] Can you cite the US federal regulation or Visa/Mastercard TOS that prohibits tracking customer purchase behavior by credit card number without consent? There may be state or local statutes I'm unaware of, but I'm confident there's nothing on a country-wide level. You are absolutely correct that Apple Pay and Android Pay do not allow tracking in this manner due to anonymous tokenizing. But that's nothing new - going back to the subject of the article, tracking generally isn't possible with cash transactions as well. [0] https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-customer-data-for-purchase-through-circana/ https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-custo... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

rubatuga 1y ago

Great for bargaining and getting cash discounts. Have extra coins? Tips are appreciated.

lisbbb 1y ago

The main problem I have with cash is that we don't have denominations large enough to buy much these days thanks to inflation. The $100 is the new $20, but ATMs won't serve $100s. I buy gas for my car, it's at least $35 right there. Groceries run $80-$120 every trip now. I don't know if revaluation is possible, but we need it. I'm not worried about dirty cash as compared to every purchase being tracked and all the fees for using services like Venmo or whatever exchange service du jour, and they all apply their petty moralizing. It's not the way forward if you value freedom and privacy.

dlcarrier 1y ago
My banks ATM defaults to $100 bills, and it takes a bunch of taps to get only $20 bills.
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago
  My local credit union has switched entirely to machined staff, even inside locations (with attendant staff for transaction impossible via ATM). For some silly reason, the machine stocks only these bills: $5$ $20$ $100$ Why waste an entire cash dispenser on fives when it could instead be handing out fifties (or at least tens)... especially at an ATM!? I think it's time for a $1000 bill, again. Let's get rid of bills less than $10$ (coins instead); also, get rid of pennies [in progress] and nickels. Leaving only: dimes*, quarters, halves, dollar [coin], $2 & $5 [coins], $10$ $20$ $50$ $100$ $1000$ [bills] *I'd suggest nix'ing this one, too, if it were physically larger [but isn't] I only stock my wallet with $100$ $50$ $10$ $2$ [bills], and immediately get rid of ones ($1$) when possible. I do not have any credit cards.
  - s5300 1y ago
    >> Why waste an entire cash dispenser on fives when it could instead be handing out fifties (or at least tens)... especially at an ATM!? Hacker News user unaware Poor People^tm exist
    - ProllyInfamous 1y ago

petermcneeley 1y ago

No worries, just be careful which protests you attend.

etbebl 1y ago

How milquetoast... "Young people want to pay with cash more, and there might be interesting reasons for that, but ehh cards are convenient and cash is gross so still no cash for me!" What's the point of this?

temptemptemp111 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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jppope 1y ago

I prefer cash, not for the reasons mentioned. First, cash makes me really think about what I'm buying. It doesn't poke you the same way when you tap a card... which is obviously one of the main reasons they want you do use cards. When I use cash, I am reminded of when I didn't have a lot, which keeps me from spending without thought. Next, its a hallmark of the middle class to spend money that you don't have. Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance... I do not want to be one of those people. When you use cash, its stupidly easy to know if you have the money or not. Its also easier to do social activities when you have cash. Need to split a tab, here's the money. I'll buy the next round, heres the cash. Also, it may just be me but keeping a decent stack of bills is like a little pat on the back for the hard work. Its a reminder that hard work pays off, which I can see when I buy a coffee, or some bread or something. Reasons why I don't like cash: family members tend to treat my wallet like an ATM. Lastly, if you want to make some people feel good (e.g. servers, bartenders, etc) tip them with $2 bills

whycome 1y ago
$2 bills?? You’re gonna get the occasional one who thinks you’re scamming them. It’s crazy that Canada, being so similar to the US, got rid of the 1 and 2 like 30 years ago.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  It seems to be much less common these days (probably because smartphones make it easier to look things up), but there are assorted news stories about people being accused of counterfeiting or even arrested for trying to pay for things with $2 bills.
- homefree 1y ago
  I had a funny experience with a French cheese shop in SF for this - I tipped a $2 bill and he called me back in confused thinking it was fake, but was good natured when I showed him it was real.
  - 1y ago

Gathering6678 1y ago

I was surprised to know recently that, in France apparently, there are quite a lot of shops that don't accept cash. I thought it was going to be the other way around: shops stipulating "cash only". In my country, there are actually regulations mandating the acceptance of cash (unless it's an unmanned booth or certain vendoring machines, if I remember correctly).

frm88 1y ago
You can protest this, since it's illegal: all stores in France must accept cash https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-of-payment/national-cash-management-policy/acceptability#:~:text=Cash%20is%20legal%20tender%20in,how%20they%20wish%20to%20pay. https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-of-p...

jojobas 1y ago

Of all things, rejecting cash because it's a social construct is a bit unexpected.

NoGravitas 1y ago
The linked article "Do you not like money" gives a bit better explanation. It's not just cash, but all kinds of money that are an "odd, and mildly dystopian" social construct. The Culture has a proverb, "money is a sign of poverty".

singpolyma3 1y ago

Cash is honestly the worst. I've boycotted cash only places most of my life and have never carried cash as an adult. It was may e the best we could do in history but it serves no purpose now.

MarcelOlsz 1y ago
Privacy.

TheAlchemist 1y ago

One additional feature for paying in cash, is from the business side - a lot of small businesses declare only a part of what's paid in cash, and the rest is kept 'tax free'. While it breaks the law, I kind of feel sympathetic to it, given how much the law tends to advantage big companies.

gghffguhvc 1y ago
Paying tax isn’t a big company vs small company thing. A single company not paying tax isn’t that bad directly but it can be infectious. “They don’t pay neither should I” attitude is a problem.
- TheAlchemist 1y ago
  I know, but then you look at effective tax paid by big companies and it makes you wonder.
NoGravitas 1y ago
This is more important for tips. If you pay a tip by card, the tipped worker will have to declare the full value of the tip as income. If you pay by cash, they are supposed to declare the full value of the tip as income, but what's actually reported by the business to the IRS is 15% of sales. Any cash tips over that amount you can probably get away with not reporting.

dartharva 1y ago

I started abandoning cash around a decade ago, and have steadily moved to mobile-only payments for the past five years (India has ubiquitous instant bank-to-bank transfers through mobile payment platforms). Not having to carry your wallet around and make trips to ATMs is rather convenient, but in aggregate, I'll still NOT recommend this. I realize I have ended up spending several times I would have had I stuck to cash. There seems to be a psychological aspect that makes you keep track subconsciously of how much you are spending when you have to physically draw cash. With mobile payments? It's just scan a code and forget about it. I am planning to stop by the end of this year.

FriedPickles 1y ago

Contactless Bitcoin lightning payments. Best of both worlds.

seany 1y ago
Monero would be ideal
politelemon 1y ago
It would be useful if bitcoin were treated as a currency and not an investment vehicle. It's too late now.

paulgerhardt 1y ago

> Cash is also—I regret to say—disgusting. Not true! For a while I was manufacturing cash and did some research on the hygiene component. Surprisingly, I learned tap to pay was the most hygienic iff one didn’t use a common terminal for tips or signing. Coins were the second most hygienic with a germ score of 168RLU . Cash third. Credit fourth, and dead last was shared payment terminals one physically touched (this includes tap to pay if one “answers a couple of questions.”) A separate study found smart watches were dirtier than terminals. [1] https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is-the-least-hygienic-payment-method/ https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is... [2] https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/ https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/ [3] https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-global-health-and-the-environment/ https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-glo... And amusingly [4] https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-average-contain-over-26000-bacteria-2/ https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-a... Reports in this space are full of confirmation bias so take the RLU scores with a grain of salt. Likewise some cultures have cleaner methods of dealing with cash than others.

noduerme 1y ago

I'm very sympathetic to both the cash-as-privacy and cash-as-fair-access (for unbanked people, to goods and services) arguments, and I won't support any business that doesn't take cash. Credit cards are a snare for the chronically indebted, to shake pennies from their pockets to transfer to the wealthy. However, if you have no debt (which is enough to be considered "wealthy", IMO), you'd be a fool not to use a credit card for most transactions. Because the rewards they hand out are built into the prices paid for everything by people who pay with cash. In my own case... I got my first credit card at 18, and by the time I was 22 I had racked up $20k in debt. I took drastic action and stopped using cards completely, and lived only on my income from multiple jobs, going without anything I wanted to buy for several years. Beans, rice, pasta, one pair of shoes, three shirts. Until I paid it off. By the time I was 24 I had paid it off waiting tables, driving taxi. Then I cancelled my cards. And so for reasons unrelated to privacy, I had no credit cards for 15 years after that, and only used cash or debit cards. It was only in my mid thirties that I was put wise to the fact that I was losing 1% to 3% of my average spend by not having a card. So I got the most expensive card I could with the best payback ratio, and have never carried a balance on it at the end of a month. Over the ten years I've had it, it's paid me back somewhere around $30k, all siphoned from the pockets of people who don't pay their debt off. Is this a vile and rapacious system? Absolutely. Would I be stupid not to take advantage of it after doing my time and learning the hard way? Yeah. I still pay cash a lot, because I don't need a record of what I'm up to. And I'd support a ban on credit cards which would lead to merchants dropping prices for everyone. But here we are.

limagnolia 1y ago
Most if not all of those rewards are paid for by the interchange that they charge merchants, not the interest they charge customers. Of course, interest and fees are also profitable, but banks are pretty happy if you use the card and pay it off every month.
- noduerme 1y ago
  Really? I guess I didn't realize that. I always felt a kind of "screw you" joy at paying it off completely every month, like I'm getting away with something lol.

daft_pink 1y ago

I really like paying cash at self service restaurants now so I don’t have to deal with their tip screen nonsense.

hackernewsdhsu 1y ago

Cash is privacy. Hope all you card-only cucks get taken by the billionaire class, looking to transfer your wealth to them.

bslaq 1y ago

[flagged]

newscracker 1y ago

I feel there’s very little hope for privacy and freedom if people like the author — who claim to be for privacy and understand the implications of digital payments — choose cards all the time “because it’s convenient”. Convenience and coercion (by the businesses not accepting cash or governments forcing more “cashless”) are what the common person succumbs to. I’m not saying that everyone should switch to cash for everything all the time. But the more that privileged people switch to digital payments and eschew cash, the more difficult it becomes for those who rely on or want to use cash to do so. Choosing privacy could mean a little more (or a lot more, depending on one’s views) inconvenience. Hopefully there are still enough people who use cash and keep cash payments alive for longer (which helps many other people who may not be as privileged or as educated as a different crowd).

bob1029 1y ago

From a business owner perspective, it can be cheaper to operate a card only business than a cash only business, especially if you intend to do it legally and with a proper bank. There is no bank on earth that will service a cash heavy (only) business for free. The cost/risk/fees of moving the physical cash around can be worse than what Visa charges. You could go one step further and think about it from the bank perspective. The cost of physically transacting cash when you could send a packet across the ether to accomplish the same is a wild increase in energy expenditure, etc. Someone had to physically drive to the bank to move the cash. There's no other option. Possibly in a gigantic armored vehicle. Often times multiple times per week. Handling all of this activity is very expensive for all parties involved.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
I often did the cash drop for a local restaurant. It certainly wasn’t free, but having a lackey drop a few thousand in a plastic bag into the night slot was affordable. It’s not quite enough money to worry that it might be stolen regularly. The bank has counting machines and a safe built in the last century as well.

jongjong 1y ago

I hate cash and its digital equivalent. I only use it because I am forced to, against my will, because everyone else has been conditioned into thinking that it has value. Fiat money is the root of all evil. Besides the way it systematically steals wealth from the worker class and gives it to the owner class, there is nothing else to say about it. Many reports have been written about the mechanisms via which the monetary system steals wealth from the working class. I'm tired of linking to them. The conditioning is too strong. Frankly the more this goes on, the more sympathy I feel for the owner class for their contempt for the sheeple. I'm starting to think they are right. People are dumb and evil and should be milked for all they've got. I mostly feel bad for those of us who can see what's going on and are treated the same as the sheeple.

JohnFen 1y ago

I almost never use my card in everyday transactions anymore. I pay with cash probably 90% of the time. For me, this has been an amazingly good thing that has improved my happiness level. Just being able to avoid seeing those damned tip prompts alone is well worth it.

rchaud 1y ago

I don't think touching cash is any more disgusting than opening a door at a public business, holding a rail on a subway or holding the gas nozzle while refilling a car. I find cash to be easier to budget with for discretionary expenses as you can simply see what's left without needing to route expenses through an app.

nunez 1y ago

lol; like dad sneakers, what's old is new again. I did this back in 2014 or so when I was, ironically, more strapped for cash and needed to debug my budget (thanks, student loans!). i stopped because carrying change is annoying as fuck, losing cash is annoying at best and painful at worst, and tracking cash purchases is actually much harder than purchases made on the card. instead, i used my debit card for purchases (couldn't spend beyond my means with it) until my income situation improved. i use one credit card exclusively now (and pay it down at the end of the month). this was before businesses started going card-only post COVID. that's another reason why i wouldn't do this today. (I built a Go-based expense tracker years ago that turns all bank alerts and receipts into, then, transactions in Expensify and, now, rows in Google Sheets. I'm able to track literally every single card transaction I make as well as reconcile purchases with their receipts. this is impossible with cash.)