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Comment by RealityNow | Hacker News Reader

I live in NYC, and most stores seem to have $5-10 credit card minimums.

America needs to admit that it's no longer the bastion of innovation that it once was (I say this as an American. If anyone doesn't believe me, just take a trip to East Asia). Americans are complacent and fine with not having the cutting edge (not to mention our failing infrastructure).

I wish there was a way to change this attitude, but it feels like most people are too busy working and paying off their student debt. If every American had to fly to Tokyo or Seoul for a week, I think we'd put up less with our failing infrastructure. Or maybe this "Everyone for themselves, it's someone else's problem" greed mindset is too ingrained in our DNA.

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As Chinese, I would say, the scale and speed of China getting rid of cash is truly impressive and makes me proud, but, in US, with credit card and Apple/Android Pay, I am pretty much cashless as well. For me, the achievement of mobile payment is social-economical, that is more about how companies could persuade customers to adapt a new way of doing something than inventing some ground-breaking technology.

In case of China, put it into another perspective. Chinese banks have long been state-owned and very ineffective. Credit cards are incredibly difficult to apply, and cumbersome to use after you get it because the banks refuse to pay you back in case of frauds. This is why WechatPay/Alipay could be so successful:

1.There is no existing dominating technologies.

2.It mitigate the fraud problem that it is harder to stole/clone your card.

3.The onboarding process is really easy.

All in all, I think mobile payment takes off in China is pretty logical, while in other countries, like Japan/South Korea, it is not common at all, even though they are close to China culturally and their economies are considered to be more advanced than China's. This is a classic example of second mover advantage, that China could enjoy this great leap forward, only because it is not advanced enough before so doesn't have all the legacy to carry along.

However, I agree with you that US needs to ditch the illusion, that it is still the norm of innovation and others should follow. The world is getting diverse once again after the cold war, more and more innovations will happen elsewhere, like in East Asia or India. Time to let go of that useless ignorance and set down to truly listen and, learn.

Why are you "proud" of removing cash going fully digital allows governments to implement negative interest rates ie steal your monney

Because it speaks loud that Chinese technologists are using technology to make everyone's life better.

And none of your comment actually happened.

Actually, negative interest rate policies have been implemented quite a few times in Europe. The Swiss did in the early 70's, Sweden and Denmark both did for a while during the recession, and the ECB did it in 2014 for bank deposits.

So yes, it actually can happen. But it doesn't require digital cash.

They can implement negative interest rates with paper money also.

yes but if you hold cash they don't come and take 1% out of your wallet

They don't need to, because they can take the 1% out of your wallet by printing more pieces of paper with dead politicians faces on it.

Not the same one of the Baltic countries has openly speculated about taking money directly from peoples bank accounts.

Ahh yes, that is different, and worth being paranoid about if you live in one of those countries where it's an idea people in power are considering.

Inflation affects all kinds of money - including that sitting in a bank account. All forms of electronic payment include rent paid to some company and that's above and beyond currency devaluation.

Chinese Yuan that stays in your online payment account is usually managed by some cash funds, e.g. Yuebao from Alipay currently manages over $200 billion and it is returning 4.1% pa.

In case you are arguing that the <1% fee should be considered as a part of the overall "interest" rate, well, that small fee does bring you the real convenience.

> but, in US, with credit card and Apple/Android Pay, I am pretty much cashless as well

The thing is though is that the US has a habit of getting these things decades after they're introduced.

The US has just started EMV rollouts and it's still the only country that depends on signatures. Most of the developed world has had EMV with a PIN for what, 15 years now?

Contactless payments have been widespread in Australia (home) for at least 5 years and by "widespread", I don't mean a few particular retailers support them, I mean everything from the independent coffee or fish and chip shop down the street to every major supermarket chain, cinema, Starbucks and McDonald's.

The US is just barely keeping itself 5-10 years behind the rest of the world.

Went to the donut shop, got a $1.50 donut with a credit card, no minimums here in LA. This NYC place sounds fairly strange.

I lived in Beijing for 9 years. It changed much since then, but the tech brought out was solving mostly local problems with local solutions. When I started living there, I used to pay for rent by withdrawing 20K or so RMB from the ATM machine (in 100 bills), loading it into a bag, then giving it the landlord. I never did that in the USA before, never had to, it wasn't the problem the USA had. Now I can use Wepay, oh, or I can go to the bank and do a direct funds transfer (as a foreigner, I could never get ebanking setup).

> If every American had to fly to Tokyo or Seoul for a week, I think we'd put up less with our failing infrastructure.

All of these places have their own thing. Don't get confused and think that the problems they are solving are much better than the ones we are. I've had plenty of trouble in Tokyo that I wouldn't experience in the states (dammit, streets should have names!), they are just different.

yeah, and Walgreens will allow you to buy a 40 cent pack of gum with a credit card. They are surely losing money on that transaction. Your donut shop is losing over 30% when they let you buy a single donut for 1.50$ with your card. That's why sane merchants (often independent) will have a minimum. This isn't a NYC specific thing at all.

Where do you get this 30% number?

Typical minimum credit charge is 30 cents plus a percentage of the gross.

These are very high interchange numbers. I think it was bad like that in the past, but not today.

interchange can be pretty high, especially for premium reward cards. what changed recently was interchange on debit cards (which used to be much higher in the US). this is why debit issuers no longer offer any real sort of "points" or cashback on debit. and why debit and cash users essentially subsidize credit card users in the US

The amazing internet infrastructure in Korea caused them to develop many service that relied on Internet Explorer, preventing them to pick up new standard as easily as countries that were later to the party.

That's probably the same kind of stuff here. The US did develop a universal non-cash system decades before other countries and now is stuck with its quirks. Europe started later and is slightly better. China started even later and could just use the fact that even poor people had an internet connected computer with them at all times except in the shower.

The country can still produce innovative things even if the people do not want to adopt them.

Its an attack from both sides, though. Monied established interests systemically manipulate the economy through the state to prevent competition and innovation from gaining traction, while the people are indoctrinated into anti-intellectual and anti-progress ideologies and thus personally resist change.

Both are done for a profit motive, so the real problem is probably the simplest to acknowledge but the hardest to solve - corruption.

Generally (and excluding AmEx), requiring minimum purchases is a violation of the merchant-processor agreement.

That was the case until 2010, but since then the law requires that processors allow merchants to have a minimum purchase requirement of up to $10.

What law is that? State or Federal?

Federal. It was part of Dodd-Frank. That specific part was often referred to as the "Durbin amendment".

The Federal government does not have nexus in individual retail credit card transactions (aside from offenses like civil rights violations, e.g. "we don't sell to your kind!").

The Durbin amendment (see quoted statute in other comment) prevents networks from forcing small merchants to accept small charges, not merchants from imposing minimums on consumers.

State and local laws can still prohibit CC minimums via statute or via licensing.

> requiring minimum purchases is a violation of the merchant-processor agreement

That is exactly the type of agreement that the Durbin amendment prohibits. I don't see any mention of state or local laws prior to now, so that seems like a complete non sequitur to me.

... because it appears that you haven't read the statute (it's quoted in my other comment thread). For credit cards (as opposed to debit), it affects processors only.

> it affects processors only

Yes, exactly like I said. It prevents processors from requiring merchants not to have minimum charges. In other words, it prevents processors from making agreements with merchants where "requiring minimum purchases is a violation of the merchant-processor agreement". It doesn't stop someone else from stopping the merchant from having a minimum charge, but it does stop the type of merchant-processor agreement that you described.

I don't see how you differ from what I wrote.

The start of the thread was the claim that the Durbin amendment made it illegal for merchants to set CC minimums for consumer purchases. That's the false interpretation.

What I originally wrote is easily verifiable and clearly does not say that:

> the law requires that processors allow merchants to have a minimum purchase requirement of up to $10

I give up. You refuse to see the distinction between the processor-merchant relationship and the merchant-consumer relationship.

No, I'm really don't. My original comment is about the processor-merchant relationship. You can tell because it uses the word "processor" and "merchant" and is about what the processor allows the merchant to do.

Even when that was true (which, as a sibling comment notes, it is not anymore), it was common anyway.

The statute says:

"(3) NO RESTRICTIONS ON SETTING TRANSACTION MINIMUMS OR MAXIMUMS.–A payment card network shall not, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, inhibit the ability of any person to set a minimum or maximum dollar value for the acceptance by that person of any form of payment.”

It does not inhibit state or local jurisdictions from banning merchants from setting card minimums in their individual credit card consumer transactions.

South Carolina resident here, no credit card minimums.

I have seen it in North Carolina and Florida. Usually with mom & pop shops.

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