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Comment by RoboTeddy | Hacker News Reader

What's an example situation where this is useful? (I don't doubt there is one-- just not sure what it is!)

edit: OK, so you can maintain a cash balance on Amazon... is this the early stages of a plan to allow p2p payments a la Venmo?

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Lots of people[citation needed] still like to pay for things in cash. I hang around a fair amount of Dave Ramsey fans, so my view might be skewed here. But, by way of example in another industry, I know that's one of the many sticking points for Stallman with ride sharing - taxis at least let you pay cash.

This is surprising, it might not get a lot of traction, and I don't know what these partners are getting out of the deal (apart from maybe the extra candy bar purchase at the counter), but I'm tentatively glad that it exists. More ways to pay cash, particularly in the tech industry, is a good thing.

EDIT: If your goal of paying cash is to cut out Visa/MasterCard/Discover/AmEx and not buy things on credit, this works. Better than a gift card too, because you don't spend $23 and feel like you have to do something with those last two dollars. But if you're looking to avoid being tracked, this has to hurt your cause.

Many people don't use banking services at all. It's pretty common to cash a paycheck and then manage a weekly or monthly budget by dividing up the cash into "accounts" -- put this much aside for rent, this goes away into my rainy day stash, this is what I'll use for groceries, etc. People do it for many reasons, but usually it's a combination of bad credit, distrust of banks, or distrust of themselves if they take advantage of credit. It could also be that it's unreported income, of course. So, with this product, Amazon gives cash-first or cash-only people a way to buy things online.

Just occurred to me after seeing the other comments that this use case was already supported by gift cards.

this is supposedly no-fee, at least for now. gift cards are quite the scam, i think the standard is a $4.99 fee for cards under $100.

General purpose visa/mastercard gift cards yes, but single-company gift cards just cost face-value (or sometimes slightly discounted at places like Sam's). And some of the participating stores like CVS already sell Amazon gift cards.

I think you may be thinking of Amex and Visa gift cards. AFAIK, those are the only ones that charge any sort of fee. Amazon, and other retailers, eTailers, restaurants, etc., generally don't have a fee to buy or maintain, and funds never expire.

I imagine that it's the same use case as buying gift cards for yourself with cash. If you don't have a credit card and you need to buy something online, you'd do it by buying yourself a gift card. This appears to be the same thing except they don't make you type in the gift card number.

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