Amazon Cash
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7% of US households are unbanked, and 20% are underbanked(1).
Many people are paid in cash, or simply cash their checks at Walmart or a check cashing place. The money never touches a bank account, and they don't have a credit card.
Paying for things with cash in similar ways is actually pretty common in other countries. When booking an airline ticket in Indonesia, I was surprised that there wasn't even an option for credit card payment - after clicking "purchase", it gave me a code and said to go to the 7/11 equivalent (which might have even been 7/11), give the counter my code and cash for the ticket.
Not-cash is probably harder to steal, but I'd have thought it preferable. (To a robber.)
He seemed incredulous that I didn't know that immediately; he asked me if I was a trust fund kid and if this was my first job. I told him, a little defensively, that I had held several jobs previously and most of them just used direct deposit.
Apparently all of his other employees had just been taking their paychecks to a check-cashing place, and paying a fee to get cash. If he gave them cash, then they could save the fee on their end and he didn't actually have to keep money in the bank account that handled payroll, which I guess saved him some fees on his end as well.
I definitely asked some pointed questions to figure out if it was a tax dodge, though; it was kind of a sketchy business.
An Ivy League professor who spent 4 months working in a South Bronx check-cashing store says we're getting it all wrong http://www.businessinsider.com/check-cashing-stores-good-dea...
If you have good credit (which usually requires a well documented reliable income, and no outstanding unmaintained debt from say, a college education or medical condition), if have the $20 or so to spend to keep the account open and in good standing, if you have the time and patience to make sure you never accidentally overdraw or under-use (so as not to get hit with costly fees).
Then sure, a bank account is "free" in the US.
If any of the above doesn't apply to you, then you might have some troubles. And there are a lot of businesses that exist to take advantage of (typically poor) people who have had troubles with real banks.
Yes, account maintenance fees are lame, but there are banks that don't have these. They've only recently become widespread for your typical checking account. Banks are getting more aggressive since the myth that using banks somehow benefits the customer is dead (they no longer pay interest, and mostly just laugh when you complain).
For the other things, yes, if you want use your bank account to pay, you have to make sure it has money in it. Is that some sort of problem? Do you expect a bank account to be a license for free money, or this to just automatically handle itself? I don't get it. You say people want bank accounts but can't get them because they don't have the "time and patience" to manage them? Isn't that a good reason not to give them to them?
We do, in fact, have strict banking regulations and a federally-backed insurance program to protect depositors in mismanaged institutions.
I guess the point is that people always paint the U.S. as if it's some wasteland where we kick the teeth of everyone with a net worth < $1M. That's not the case. On further inspection, as in this thread, you'll find that many (though not all) such complaints are someone attempting to craft a sob story out of the fact that we don't live in a rainbow world where bank accounts magically fill themselves up.
I found this out when I went to try to open a joint account with a business partner and got denied. We ended up opening the account at an institution which I already used, instead.
(Genuine question: I don't know if they are any better in that regard, or not.)
The credit union that I'm banking with doesn't have a minimum account balance or account fees: https://www.firsttechfed.com/bank/checking/carefree_checking
Am I missing something?
Your experience with local credit unions is the same as mine. If you come in with $100 you can open an account.
Anyway, getting back to the original question - if credit unions are indeed much more flexible wrt opening accounts, and not require account fees, why are there so many people without accounts? Is it because some areas simply don't have credit unions?
And banks have a (in the US) deservedly poor reputation amongst the poor.
Less common now (maybe barred now?), banks would take the day's transactions and apply them in an order which deliberately fucked the customers. Let's say your balance is $100, and you get paid $1500 today. But you're living paycheck to paycheck so you delayed bill payments until today. You pay 5 bills, total value of $1000 (you have enough, technically). The banks would order the execution of those transactions to hit you with overage fees for as many of the payments as possible. If you noticed it right away, they'd refund the money with a phone call (and a few hours of your time on hold). Otherwise, you're just out a couple hundred dollars. All your bills will have been paid, but you would have been hit with up to five $25-75 overdraft fees before your deposit was finally processed.
Or how Wells Fargo was creating accounts for people without their consent, resulting in people who had enough money in their accounts suddenly not and being hit with fees and penalties for their trouble.
[0] They'll also change these in the fine print periodically. My free checking was a $1000 minimum with Bank of America. I'd switched to USAA for most things, but they have no physical branches. Occasionally needing a real bank, I left the $1000 in my BoA account, then one month I got hit with a fee. Turned out they'd bumped the minimum to $1500, found the letter and it was indeed small print indicating the change to the small print, buried in 10 or so pages of material about my account.
Use a local bank or credit union.
Gas stations and some other companies 'susceptible to fraud' Have the ability to withdraw cash before the whole bill goes through. So the swipe has $70 withdrawn, then redeposit it (with a long delay), and then charge your bill. So you end up with multiple overcharges for one transaction if the first withdrawal is too large.
Account features like paying/auto-transfer from savings being disabled if you trigger arbitrary rules.
Normal banks and even most credit unions are purposefully exclusive in policy. Though I imagine a lot of it is "this is just how it's done" than purposeful. Though it does all feel pretty hateful after banking at military banks, since there is a working model right there.
Tipping on a completely service-less event, when already being ripped off by paying to move money around... I dont understand americans.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-pilots-cash-on-delivery-...
Banks are surely convenient, but they come with tradeoffs. It's plausible that some people choose to be "unbanked" or "underbanked" because they don't like the risk profile attached to banking, and sometimes that's a totally rational decision.
If you don't have a bank account, you don't have to worry about the bank inventing new fees to assess. Last time I opened a bank account, it came with a list of conditions and said 2 out of 3 of these MUST be met each month to avoid account maintenance fees. They're things like "Use your bank debit card at least 10 times this month" and "Maintain an average daily minimum balance of $x".
Fret not, however, for the bank distributes a small chart that can be used to help you ensure that you are complying with their demands, and thus can avoid punishment both for not spending enough money in a way they like and also for not having enough money on deposit. If you don't spend and/or have enough, you are getting dinged each month with a non-trivial fee.
Without a bank account, you also don't have to worry about information security, bank policies or hiccups impeding your access to your money, federal anti-money laundering regulations that require depositors to justify "large" cash withdrawals, state-imposed garnishments and/or levies ripping your money out from under you, and so on.
So again, I have a bank account and I appreciate the convenience of banking. But I think some people choose to forgo banking rationally, and that it's not something that should be treated as a social ill.
The only real potential issue around this is the regulations that the government put into place after 9/11, which may or may not be blocking some legitimate people from being legally allowed to open a bank account. Otherwise, I think it's silly to treat this like it's some big unjustice rather than a personal choice or an issue with super crappy banks ripping off depositors (which, again, hurts the poor the most; if you have $20k in your bank account, a $30 fee is an annoyance; if you have 20 bucks in your bank account, a $30 fee is now a cascade of $30 fees, and you end up owing the bank $250).
They didn't have checking accounts because they were generally unable to attain one.
I'm not saying people with unique issues shouldn't be accommodated, but their problems are more basic than something that a change in bank policy/regulation will adequately improve. The issue is not about being "underbanked", it's about improving accessibility to the environment.
It is true that at a time in the past, checking accounts were guarded more carefully, as the bank was fronting that money on your behalf and would have to be reasonably confident that it'd be in your checking account when they went to get reimbursed. That's not unreasonable, but checking accounts weren't the only type of account offered at the bank, and they absolutely were in wide use, even among unfortunate people, at least until they bounced too many checks.
This has mostly gone away with debit cards, because the bank can now tell whether you have the money in the account or not before they approve the transaction. Last time I got a checking account, the process was a formality, and there were no eligibility requirements in excess of the documentation legally required to open an account and the (small) minimum deposit.
The other thing is there's an implication here that banking is a human necessity. There's another commenter who laments that people in Nepal don't have a Mastercard.
People do not have a right to banking. It's a private service, and in many ways (described above), it's not a desirable one. Banks no longer pay an appreciable amount of interest, which was most of their value proposition to the consumer before they were able to shoehorn in as the keepers of electronic payment systems.
I'm just going to call a spade a spade here, and say that the reason there's a sudden interest in the "unbanked" is that they have a harder time participating in online commerce, and the government is anxious to hop on board that train because money in banks is money under their control.
Some founder of an irrelevant SaaS app is lamenting that a Nepalese person may not find it convenient to pay him $10 / mo to email the local air pollution index or something. That's a pretty silly thing to try to cause a moral panic over.
If we want to talk about how it's cool that Amazon has devised an electronic payment system that circumvents banking, that's great, I think it's awesome. But I'm not on board with the terms "un[der]banked" in the first place, as they imply that banking is a default, and then if we accept that, I'm still not on board with acting as if they are signals of some meaningful social malignancy.
"Last time I got a checking account, the process was a formality, and there were no eligibility requirements in excess of the documentation legally required to open an account and the (small) minimum deposit."
There were many eligibility requirements - you just happened to pass all of them.
Most underbanked/unbanked people don't have bank accounts because they do not meet those eligibility requirements.
- A small deposit to open an account is for many on the lower socioeconomic ladder not feasible.
- Others cannot pass a soft pull credit check
- Many cannot pass the ChexSystem verification because they have delinquent/unsettled accounts at other banks
- Some cannot procure a government ID or verify an address
- Others can't pass criminal background checks
I've seen it, and I've lived it, and I'm certain that they would much rather keep the 3-5% of their check that gets pocketed when they try to cash it outside the mainstream banking system, but they don't have any other options.
I know that people get their kicks by pretending like Americans have a nightly ritual of peeling the toenails off the nearest poor person and grinding them up for use as seasoning, but we're stretching the limits of believability here.
Check writing became popular in the late 80s and early 90s. Checking accounts were widely available by the mid 90s. I personally know several welfare recipients who wrote checks in this era.
In present day, checking accounts are practically free (but not literally free, so it's not good enough for some people). Some institutions even pay interest on them. I've never had my credit pulled when trying to open one. Banking is a fairly competitive business here, even though there are strict federal and local regulations, but it's getting worse since the dominance of electronic payments is making bank/credit products an increasingly indispensable convenience.
And let me add that it's not just McDonald's employees who are distrustful of banks. Bitcoin was invented to help address classes of problems arising from strong centralized control of the money supply, including the government but also the [potential] chokehold from large banks. One of bitcoin's price spikes was caused by the Greek government's 2015 stoppage on withdrawals, which left millions of Greeks without the ability to access their money for weeks. [0]
While it probably makes a lot of yuppies feel better to believe otherwise, getting mired in every financial instrument that the bank promises is good for you, trusting that the government will never issue an errant levy (as a result of identity theft, for example), opening yourself to the imposition of arbitrary fees, etc., does not automatically make you an intelligent person.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/07/greece-capital-cont...
"I don't trust banks" is a setiment that actually makes sense when you only have $200 total to your name. Not to mention you are at constant risk of overdraft....
If you are at need of quick liquid capital I totally understand why you'd want to be cash only than risk stupid ATM fees, overdraft fees, whatever. It makes sense.
Nobody has ever said to me, ever, "I would really like a bank account, but I don't have access to one." It's always "I want to keep my money, I don't trust banks to keep it for me."
It's also complicates things, more than strictly necessary,that it.
Participating in the banking industry becomes a higher stakes venture than keeping your cash under a mattress.
It's a hard thing to get your average HN reader to understand unless you've 'been there, done that...'
Prevalence of cash-based compensation, under-reporting income for various tax and benefits purposes, outstanding child support, unpaid debts, fines, outstanding collections (or disputes with collection agencies) - a variety of reasons that all lead to a feeling of control with cash in hand vs. feeling of loss of that control when an electronic number is suddenly eaten up by various ACH pulls and garnishments.
NSF fees are basically the equivalent of high-interest short-term loans. In some ways they are worse because the interest is assessed instantly and reducing your cash flow. Let's say you screw up and end up $5 off on your budgeting. OK, no big deal, maybe you take $5 out of your cash emergency savings (which might be, oh, $10 or $20) or you borrow $5 from a friend or family member until payday and you make things work. But if you have a bank account and you're off by $5 then you get hit with an NSF fee instantly. Now your bank account isn't just $5 in the hole, it's maybe $35 negative. So now you can't use it for anything until you come up with that extra $35, which is going to be more stressful to deal with. And then once you get things squared away after payday you're out that $30 for no perceptible real value. And that's assuming you don't get a cascade effect happening, which can easily happen if you're in a temporary money crunch.
If you're living close to the margins you can't afford to risk that sort of expenditure for no return happening every once in a while. Some people simply can't afford to live that way, it's easier to live on a cash basis. You cash your paychecks at the bank they were issues or you go to a walmart and you pay a bit of overhead. You pay your bills in cash or via money order or cashier's check. It'll cost a bit to live that way, a lot more than $30 a year generally, but it's predictable and it's under your control.
I'll admit, I'm originally po' white trash, but I consider that pretty good wages for a cushy non-labor job at Micky Ds or Dunky Donuts.
The fastest way to ensure those jobs disappear would be a $15 minimum wage.
Amazon skips the credit card fees. The businesses working with them probably don't have to pay Amazon the money for a few weeks, meaning they get to carry an interest-generating balance in the meantime.
If you don't spend all of the money you put on your account, then Amazon gets to hold that cash until you do, generating interest on the money held.
All the while, the customers who need this service get something they couldn't before- online shopping without a credit card, including the better selection and price competition that online shopping offers. (Yes, it's sometimes cheaper offline, but not always).
Curious though; can you ELI5 who actually pays the interest?
---
I met a banker the other day and I asked him simply "how does one actually found a bank" his reply;
"Oh it's really simple, have $30,000,000 and you can create your own bank!"
Simple!
The bank that Amazon holds its money in.
> Simple!
Well, it is simple, it's a very straightforward method. Simple doesn't mean easy.
ELI5: Lots of people have business ideas that can make money, but often they need to have a small pile of money in order to make more money. Let's imagine you are such a person. I lend you money to start your business, then your business makes lots of money, and you pay me back. That's a good deal for you, but not for me. Your business might not work out, and you might lose all my money. I'll still lend you the money, but I want you to pay me back more money since I took this risk for you.
That's where the money paid in interest comes from.
Similarly, you might replace 'start a business' with 'buy a house' or 'buy a car'. You don't have enough money to do so right now, but you know that your life will be improved by having these things, so you borrow money to do them. The people lending you the money won't do it for free.
Less ELI5: Alternatively, the businesses holding this money for four weeks will estimate what the lowest amount they'll be carrying over the next 5 years will be, then just go and invest that amount in stocks, bonds, etc. Since their balance will never fall below that amount, the money is effectively an interest-free loan from Amazon that they use to make interest-earning investments with.
It is not really an innovation. This is basically private money that can only be used at a particular store.
At the dawn of industrial revolution large mills used to pay their workers with "scrip" -- a private type of cash that could only be used in company-owned stores. The company basically double-dipped: first profiting from the labor of the workers, then profiting from the mark-up on the goods and services "sold" to the workers.
Once you put money in Amazon cash, it goes to Amazon and nobody else. It is no longer "cash" or legal tender if you can't use it wherever you want.
I worry, however, about financial products like this that get aimed at people who don't have bank accounts. They're a particularly vulnerable population.
Honestly I think that's most of the reason why Ralphs sells Google Play/iTunes/Best Buy/Amazon gift cards. People buy them with cash and then use them for themselves.
Is this really any different then buying an Amazon gift card other then you can choose the amount to put on it?
2) you don't have to convert ALL of your cash into Amazon credit. You can allocate a portion that is useful to find cheaper/better selection of products on Amazon. They rest you can spend wherever/whenever you want
What if Amazon, with the fact that they built that huge CIA data center (think AWS for the CIA, plus the other contracts, plus the WAPO purchas...) is now doing an op to determine where grey money may be going and on what...
Think of it as a data op...
the infra to determine where monied intentions are going - it has nothing to to with terrorism, but everything to do with totalitarianism.
2) Where can I use Amazon Cash?
We have partnered with thousands of stores across the country, including CVS Pharmacy®, Speedway, Sheetz, Kum & Go, D&W Fresh Market, Family Fare Supermarkets, and VG's Grocery with more retailers coming soon. A directory of all participating stores can be found at www.amazon.com/cash.
Are they saying you can also spend your 'Amazon dollars' at those stores? Because then that definitely does sound like 'bank of Amazon'. It would be a logical way to get a slice of that sweet sweet payment intermediary industry pie.
EDIT: And it would put them in prime position to collect data on their competitors' retail transactions...
- Amazon would be able to see what CVS customers are buying, for what price and in what combination. That would make it pretty easy for Amazon to pick off CVS customers.
- If a large enough percentage of CVS' sales were settled in Amazon bucks, it would put Amazon in a position where they could 'tax' one of their bigger retail competitors by jacking up 'transaction processing' fees.
You really don't want to be reliant on a wholesale monopolist who also happens to be a retail competitor.
No, clearly not:
> 1) What is Amazon Cash? > Amazon Cash lets you add cash to your Amazon Balance [...] > Your Amazon Balance can be used to shop for millions of eligible physical products and digital content
Also unbanked can purchase amazon gift cards with cash.
I suspect many of us on HN have a distorted view of how hassle-free online shopping is because we live in buildings or neighborhoods where packages can be left without signature with a high probability of making it to us and many of us have the luxury of working from home on the odd day when we need to sign for an expected delivery.
That's what Amazon Locker is for. Not sure how widespread this is though.
I view this less as Amazon competing directly with Walmart than a Safeway or CVS using Amazon to provide more value to its current customer base.
Not sure if it's 100% accurate, but as an example, there doesn't seem to be a single Amazon locker location in the entire state of Mississippi according to Google Maps.
But it's easier to get packages near home now that UPS (at least here in NYC) just rolled out the 'Access Point' program where one can get their packages delivered to local grocery stores, bodegas, etc. for free. You just bring in an ID and pick up the package.
I lived for several years without a bank account and throughout that time I always had a home and a shipping address. Millions of people in the US don't have bank accounts. Not because they are vagrants or homeless but simply because they live too close to the margins to afford the potential economic chaos that having a bank account can cause.
It is not necessary to have a smartphone to use Amazon Cash. You can use our Print-at-Home option by visiting www.amazon.com/cash on a desktop browser and selecting “Get your barcode”. After logging into your account, you will be given an option to print out your Amazon Cash barcode which can be brought into the store for scanning.
Nice. This solves the internet at the library / school problem for a whole group of people. Still a lot of folks with the cheap LG phones for prepaid service. If they expanded to allow bill paying it would be an interesting challenge to Walmart.
[edit: also allows the "send me your code and I'll get you some money" like many use Paypal for like parents sending money to college students]
I wonder though if a paper copy is a vulnerability. Do they ask to verify your ownership of the bar code for example "What is your pin?"
Thinking about it, this might be interesting from a community funding effort. Put the bar-code on your site, plead your case, and hope people send a donation.
People are weirdly clever
[1]https://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking...
In fact, in the center of the tech bubble - SF and if you happen to visit some restaurants in Chinatown, they usually have a sign says "Cash Only". CC fees are so high (even if you don't think it's that much) that those shops rather not take any CC and save themselves from BS charges.
Please please please think, design, and build a product for a world that's not in the bubble. A simple tech integration can adds huge potential value.
I'm not so sure. Is there any actual evidence of large retailers negotiating down interchange fees? Even Walmart resorted to legislative pressure to regulate fees.
The power of network effects is strong. Retailers are reluctant to drop support for consumer-preferred payment methods and lose that business. That gives card networks a lot of negotiating power even with large merchants.
Two, the underlying interchange rates have risen since the 90s due to reward cards. It's more expensive for merchants, but a lot of that goes into customer pockets via reward programs, so it's somewhat debatable whether it qualifies as price gouging since it's driven by consumer choice.
I find value in it because I use the app a lot (there's one next to my office) and because they give you a free sandwich every 10-12 purchases. I'm guessing that free sandwich budget comes from the savings of transaction fees.
7% of the US, a first world nation with amazing credit services, is unbanked[1]. From that same source, nearly 20% is underbanked - As in, they still go to Check-cashing places and get cash directly, rather than getting direct-deposit.
Brasil Boletos: this is interesting as there are registered and unregistered versions of Boletos. With unregistered customers can pay any amount of money to it.
Taiwan has a similar system. You take vouchers to various stores (like 7-11 or the post office), pay cash, then it'll make its way to the online company.
Which brings us to a potential problem: there has been a tremendous amount of fraud in this system (Brazil's Boletos), with all sorts of malware changing the barcode when it is downloaded in an infected computer to issue a boleto with a different destination account.
Back in 2014 this was well documented by Krebs[1], and at amazing detail by @assolini from Kaspersky[2]. I also documented a specific case that happened to a friend[3]. While it should be possible to mount similar attacks on the Amazon system, having people deposit money into others' accounts, it should be straightforward for Amazon to detect this, since it is a single issuer system...
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/07/brazilian-boleto-bandits... [2] https://securelist.com/analysis/publications/66591/attacks-a... [3] http://cs.brown.edu/~rfonseca/notes/net-bb-dns-poison.html
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... (see under 2. Limitations.)
(1) The purchase process is simpler: retrieve an Amazon Cash bar code, load cash onto it at the register, it's now on your account. You can reuse the same barcode every time you want to load cash onto the account. It can be a printed piece of paper you keep in your wallet.
Previously, you had to go to a retailer with physical cards in stock, pull one off the shelf, get it activated at the register, scratch the code, and go to a computer to load the code onto your Amazon balance. If your only internet access is at a library or school, that means two trips to reload your balance.
(2) It's cheaper for Amazon. They're paying a commission to the retailer and distributor (effectively selling the cards at less than face value). Amazon Cash eliminates most of that margin, and the distributor altogether. The commission for the retailer doesn't have to be very high since none of the transactions will have credit card fees.
>To use your credit, simply purchase an eligible product from one of the following digital categories: Appstore, Kindle books, Digital Video, Digital Music, Digital Software, and Digital Video Games
No physical goods.
I am surprised that they didn't use Amazon Locker as a logical hub for adding cash credit.
You just have to go to the right store instead of a 'pickup' store.
Or use this but ship to a PO box.
Note that the referenced T&Cs do not specifically address the circumstances under which refunds are available. For example, in certain states (CA?) you are entitled to a cash refund after the balance of an account drops below a specified threshold ($5-10?). It would be useful to know what all of these exceptions are, so that people can make an informed decision.
Now, an amazon customer without a credit card or bank account has to use a gift card, which they purchase at a store. That is a lot of hassle, IMO. Sometimes an Amazon gift card is not available (i.e. not sold at Walmart) and they purchase a visa or amex or vanilla. Those have high fees and/or very confusing sign up requirements.
There is no way to reload a used amazon gift card. Since amazon has no brick and mortar store they can't sell me a one-time-only card for future loads.
Bankless and cash only customers, that I have seen, all have smart phones. Most of the time the reference numbers used to send and receive money are texted.
So, I think having a method to load an Amazon gift card from a store with cash is their end goal. [As an aside, I tried to find out if Amazon will accept credit cards at point of sale registers for gift card loading. This is, of course, prohibited, in most places as you can't buy a Visa card with anything except cash or a debit card).
I assume they have data that says the cash-only, smartphone sophisicated cohort underuses Amazon.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/alibaba-digital-bank-myban...
2) Where can I use Amazon Cash?
We have partnered with thousands of stores across the country, including CVS Pharmacy®, Speedway, Sheetz, Kum & Go, D&W Fresh Market, Family Fare Supermarkets, and VG's Grocery with more retailers coming soon. A directory of all participating stores can be found at www.amazon.com/cash.
Are they saying you can also spend your 'Amazon dollars' at those stores? Assuming the answer is 'yes', it means Amazon is looking to get a slice of that sweet sweet payment intermediary industry pie. But more importantly, they get these retailers' data for cheap and can figure out exactly where the marginal price for it lies. Think about it. These retailers might be paying Visa 2.5% transaction processing fees. Along comes Amazon who offer, say 2% fees (which might be roughly the rate they've negotiated for themselves with large payment processors).
Using CVS as an example:
Amazon start offering CVS customers varying rebates / fixed percentage discounts like: anything you buy from CVS with 'Amazon Bucks' only deducts 95% of your sales docket total from your 'Amazon not a bank account'. CVS will want their money either at point of sale or, at the very latest, through an end of day reconciliation. So in the interests of 'fraud protection' they will need to provide sales data to Amazon for those purchases. This is bad for CVS because:
- Amazon would be able to see what CVS customers are buying, for what price and in what combination. That would make it pretty easy for Amazon to gradually pick off CVS customers.
- I imagine Amazon would probably loss-lead for a while until they've become the dominant form of payment. If a large enough percentage of CVS' sales were settled in Amazon bucks (which Amazon can incentivise through rebates and discounts, hence the initial loss-lead), it puts Amazon in a position where they can 'tax' one of their retail competitors by jacking up 'transaction processing' fees.
I might be totally misunderstanding the situation here, and it's just a case of the FAQ being poorly worded. Otherwise, large retailers who sign up to this are committing a fatal strategic mistake (although I imagine the bean-counters would love it, not realising the long-term implications).
Especially if the long term strategic goal of Amazon lockers / physical points of presence is to morph into 711-style "80% of what you need in life". Which they could naturally have delivered to you within an hour.
An alternative thread, which I'll admit to cribbing from someone else's comment on the "Betterment" HN post, is that this is about the other side of the game (or even lower on the food chain): becoming a bank.
Assets under management affords the opportunity to do everything else. And it makes it impossible for anyone else to cut you out, once you scale to a "too big to ignore" size.
Amazon payments from Amazon accounts? Suddenly you're saving credit card fees + making interest on balances. Which you can roll into being that much cheaper than Walmart.
If you get assets stored under your control, that's the ultimate vertical integration.
OK that might be a bit too sci-fi. Still, interesting to think about....
But is there a fee? (Says no fee)
I made mistakes, can't get bank account right now. So I use pre-paid services or use PayPal accounts/Bitcoin (laughing on Bitcoin part, have yet to use it and don't have much of it).
Also use a card from my job, one of those types of cards that you get working at a factory or whatever.
It sucks when you have to pay a fee, like the PayPal Prepaid cards are pretty cool but you lose ~$5.00 a month.
I kinda wish that m-pesa thing was in the US. But why too, I seem to do more harm than good by spreading what money I have in various places.
Ahhh... read some more it's their money. Still, I wouldn't mind potentially having another place to store money. Even if it can only be used at Amazon.
As a customer I don't really understand this concept. Why do I bring my barcode to one of the stores (CVS, etc.) to reload my Amazon Balance...?
As others have pointed out, this is basically buying a gift card and applying it to your account in one step instead of two.
Gift cards might be closer, but this has less waste.
Dunno if this varies by area.
Can't I give you my barcode, and you put cash in it?
- sorry I just realized you would have gone in a circle -
but that's a pain/lose money. I agree though that sucks, being stuck there. Not a huge Amazon shopper myself. Still they do have nearly everything so inevitably I will more than likely return.
So people who lesser means resort to gift cards, amazon cash, etc.
What's the value to these stores in doing this? I feel like I'm missing something obvious here.
The value to them is they get a cut, of course.
Clever move by Bezos & Co.
Is there any way to go back to cash? It references the transcations as being non-refundable. Does that mean it's more of a "purchase" of Amazon.com fun bucks (i.e. scrip) rather the depositing a balance?
Just go to Walmart, buy a gift card with cash, and use it.
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
The few that do exist seem to be in WalMart locations. WalMart doesn't want the competition, so those Coinstar machines had the Amazon gift card options disabled.