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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

You're also sending a 3-5% tithe to the payment processor (credit card company, bank, electronic payment provider) with every transaction instead of giving that money directly to the service provider.

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There are still costs to handling cash, which will vary in each case based on business size.

Hiring those armoured vans to move it around, loss by theft or error by staff, time spent counting money, making cash deposits or withdrawals from the bank, and perhaps higher insurance.

Whether those costs are more or less than cash presumably varies. A public transport operator seems the obvious case where cash costs are high.

The EU capped fees at 0.2% for debit card transactions, and 0.3% for credit cards. I'd guess that makes them very competitive with cash -- the discount German supermarkets, well-known previously for only accepting cash, started to take cards. It also led to the demise of cashback credit cards, but I'm not sorry to see them go.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-2162_en.htm

Every small business owner I've talked to in the US is either indifferent or prefers cash.

If [1], of which I've only skimmed the summary, shows that the EC was aiming to "calculate a level of interchange fee that makes the merchants, on average, indifferent between a transaction by cash or by card", and if that's the level that's been implemented in the EU, then they can probably call it a success.

In the last 3-4 years, I've been surprised a few times when small businesses (plumber, street food seller, dry cleaner) have preferred a card.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/competition/sectors/financial_services/d...

Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store. And many of the mom and pop shops around me require a minimum purchase or charge a 50 cent fee for using a card.

>Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store.

The store passes the cost right back to you, the consumer, in the form of higher prices. You didn't just think they absorbed the cost out of the goodness of their hearts, did you?

Of course not. But some percentage of customers still use cash. So the store might raise prices by 1.5 pct instead of the 3pct that Visa charges them. This essentially means those who use cash are subsidizing the card users. If they raise it the full 3 percent then the cash users are paying extra for a service they don't even use!

That doesn't negate either coldpie's or my points; if anything, having people use cash effectively helping to subsidize the "credit card tax" only adds more weight to the argument that it's an unreasonable arrangement that only serves to enrich the credit card companies.

yes it does. from a game theoretic perspective, it only would make sense for me to switch to cash if everyone else did so that the store wouldn't incorporate the extra fee into the price of their goods. However, one can't control others, they can only control their own behavior. So in a situation where there goods cost extra, because others are still using their cards and the owner has to markup prices, the only rational thing to do is to use the payment method you prefer. And economically speaking, all the cash users are paying extra for a good they don't use.

You forgot a rule of the "game".

You can negotiate price with cash.

By your own admission a few comments up you'd personally be saving 50 cents every time you shopped at a mom & pop store.

Because as much as HN praises the notion of passive income streams, widespread parasitism by monopolistic and unproductive sectors of the economy are an anchor on the broader, actually-productive economy.

The payment card industry is a parasite on all of us, full stop.

I started caring a lot more when I started selling things. It's a substantial amount of money that I'm not getting because people don't want to take out cash. But I have to accept it because I'd make even less money if I was cash-only.

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