Cash Might Be King, but They Don’t Care | Hacker News Reader

Cash Might Be King, but They Don’t Care

nytimes.com

54 pointswalterbell70 comments

I've experienced something similar at resturants in TO recently! Not only didn't they straight up refuse cash, they asked me download their app to pay for food.

Obviously I walked out and got lunch elsewhere, but later when I was told that they sell their own currency in the app for CAD in denominations of 5. But their food + tax, is never sold at that amount - meaning, if your lunch is $10, tax makes it $11.3, you have to pay $15 in the app. If you have no intention of coming back, you loose the rest. This is such a scam.

Also what's the problem with accepting cash? It's trackless and it's anonymous - I love it. Why should everything I buy be tracked by Banks, Corps and everyone in-between? Furthermore, unlike credit, there's are no fees associated with it so it's slightly better for the seller too.

Btw if this does not give you a worry, think about this: all your expenses always end up at companies like Equifax. If them already selling it does not scare you, a leak should. Imagine if your transaction history can be used to refuse employment, housing etc. (without letting you know that's the case). Cash does not have any of those issues.

The biggest 2 main issues with cash is - what if I get pickpocketed? and the solution is to never really walk around with more than $50-100. I've been using cash since I was a kid, and I've never gotten pickpocketed. The 2nd one is tracking your expenses - but I personally feel like using cash has made me spend a lot less than when I used my credit card.

which restaurant? I've seen a few food court spots go cashless, but nothing about downloading an app.

I can't remember the name - it's near union station - Bremner / York. It's a very hipsterish place.

Also, you can lose your phone the same way someone can pickpocket your wallet. If we’re stopping to use cash because of this, we should stop using expensive smartphones.

>Also what's the problem with accepting cash?

Is this a serious question?

Downsides of cash: loss due to theft, miscounts, counterfeit currency, and misplacement; additional risk; a need for physical security (a place I know of went cash-only when there was two high profile robberies in a period of six months both of times involved employees getting shot); extra hardware (safes, cash drawers); extra/non-automated accounting; countless time wasted counting and recounting; time and effort to make sure there's plenty of change but not too much; loss of interest income from physical cash being held to make change; time and cost wasted on endless amount of physical transport to and from the bank; etc., etc., etc.

I'm not saying there's no upsides of cash and downsides of cards, its certainly a trade off, but don't act like one is objectively better than the other.

>there's are no fees associated

Not directly baked in, but there's is a business cost due to all of the above.

Not only that but people literally spend more money when they pay with card instead of cash. So accepting card may cost you a 3% fee but your sales to cardholders may go up 4%.

"Trackless and anonymous" is only a "feature" to businesses that commit tax fraud. No honest business is going to give two shits about that.

>all your expenses always end up at companies like Equifax.

No they do not.

>(without letting you know that's the case).

Come on. That's already illegal.

That is such a dangerous trend.

I perfectly understand the appeal though. Automatic book keeping, no more cash to move around that can temp thieves, less mistakes and cons.

But for the society ?

This just get rid of another grey area, a safety valve, a space so you have margin to maneuver.

Indeed, no systems are perfect, but they will try to enforce their own rules, and have a big inertia and cost to be changed.

Having those greys area allows for people not to be crunched by the unperfect system, or to experiment with alternatives that the system would not let exist.

Without cash, kids can't mess around as much without adults knowing. But doing so is very important to their development.

Without cash, you can't pay for a service that is illegal, even if it's not immoral. Do you know that we have freaking tomatoes that are legal to grow, but illegal to sell in France ? Yes, delicious, healthy tomatoes.

Without cash, you can't finance an activity deemed immoral, even if it's legal. Because people will learn about it and make your life a leaving hell.

Without cash, you can't disappear. But what if you need to ? Do you really trust the system to protect you if your life goes south ? We are not in the movies, the cops won't post guards in front of your house because you dated a drug dealer.

Without cash, you don't have the right to make mistakes. How many of us are perfect ? I'm certainly not, and I paid for plenty of my sins. I have many purchases I'm not proud of, but I would like them to be forgotten.

Without cash, there is no black market. Which mean if I'm looking for something that is not allowed in my country (say, boric acid to kill cock roaches), I can't.

Without cash, society is less resilient. Power outage, network trouble or your card being unusable make you unable to pay for anything.

Without cash, we give way too much power to entities managing the payment systems. Card companies don't like you ? You can't pay or take money anymore. That happened with wikileak, remember ? It was not illegal in my country, but VISA and paypal sure prevented me to make a donation to them. They stopped me to use my money in a legal way because they didn't like it. This is such a slippery slope.

So yeah, cash can be misused in plenty of ways. So can be a knife. But I certainly not want my life to be limited to a spoon-only consumption.

Also, saying it will fight cash laundering is telling only half of the story. The super-rich will still be able to do so.

I love cash, but I really dislike coins. What we need isn't a cash or E-payment only, but a Hybrid. You should be able to pay with cash, and the changes should automatically be refunded to a payment system, since the retailer are highly unlikely to change their 98 or $99.99 pricing, those pennies will continue to exist.

This system and tech is already in multiple places in South East Asia. The problem is companies like to hype themselves as a replacement of cash, and most people aren't aware of the privacy concern and implication with a cashless society.

Combining cash and card payments gives you the worst of all of them. Buying things takes even longer (giving them cash, them counting it, calculating your change, giving them your payment system card or whatever, them applying your change to that) and you still have all the privacy concerns in the paper trail of what places have been issuing you change and when.

When I go to Mexico its mostly cash dealings. The cashiers work much faster than the credit card machines and people act a bit put off if you pull out a credit card.

It is interesting to see the difference from the US to Mexico.

When everything works, electronic payment system are way more convenient.

But that's a big problem with our current societies: we keep trading "good for democracy" to "convenient for best case".

People use electronic voting machines, centralize all their data in the GAFAs databases, buy everything from amazon, get all entertainments from DRMized ad saturated controlled medias...

And then, when you discuss at diner about the big world issues, everybody say that "we can't do anything about it".

Well, for a start, we could live our live thinking about the society we are building instead of just what's comfortable right now.

We are enjoying a lof of peace right now in rich countries. It's not going to last forever, since nothing does (and history calls). In 10 years or 200 years, our countries will drift to a dictatorship phase. But it's not an immediate state you get to. It's a slow decent into madness.

You really, really want to have cash to have a healthy society. You need something malevolent players can't control. You need something less centralized so you can't be stopped from using it, or by spied on if you use it. At least for a reasonable small amount.

I get you need control for big sums. There is not good reason for a company or an entity to hide money transactions. But for humans ? There are a ton of good ones, and it's just being a good citizen to stand for keeping it around.

Coins are not so much a problem. Low value coins, umm, have little value. I've seen some examples of them being phased out.

Pennies and nickels don't exist (as change) at my local farmers' market. All the vendors I buy from round to the quarter - with a loose rounding scheme that generally favors the buyer.

While in Barcelona a while back, I reached into my pocket to pay for a ticket to Montjuic Castle. Apparently the cashier thought I was reaching for a pile of 1 or 2 cent coins. (Really? One, two, AND five cent coins introduced in 1999?). Once she realized I had 1 and 2 euro coins, she happily accepted them.

In an area where pickpocketing is apparently a big problem, I was quite happy to not have to pull my wallet out for small transactions.

http://trak.in/tags/business/2017/12/22/amazon-pay-wallet-ch...

Amazon Pay is targeting this issue specifically in India, though yes, its an overall generic wallet as well

>Without cash, we give way too much power to entities managing the payment systems. Card companies don't like you ? You can't pay or take money anymore. That happened with wikileak, remember ? It was not illegal in my country, but VISA and paypal sure prevented me to make a donation to them. They stopped me to use my money in a legal way because they didn't like it. This is such a slippery slope.

Also, payment processors are not legally required to issue cards to everyone who asks. This adds yet another burden to those who are already poor/un-banked/un-documented.

And all cards are not created equals. They are literally tokens of how private companies see you.

When I started being a consultant, I had suddenly very low and very large ups and downs on my bank account. It was very irregular and my bank decided I was not to be trusted anymore and switched my regular card for a toy one. I could not even pay tolls and parking with it, and was caped to 500$ I could pay with for a month.

In that case, having cash is the only reason you can keep living like you used too.

Also I switched bank.

When the service provider goes down, do the POS systems have a way of batching transactions locally and sending them later? Or are you effectively shut down in the meantime?

And are they wired or wireless? If they're running on Wi-Fi or even cellular it'd be relatively easy[1] to jam. Doesn't even have to be for too long either. Hitting a rival during the lunch rush is more then enough.

> Not surprisingly, the credit card companies, who make a commission on every credit card purchase, applaud the trend. Visa recently offered select merchants a $10,000 reward for depriving customers of their right to pay by the method of their choice. A Visa executive described this practice to CNN as offering shoppers “freedom from carrying cash.”

Yeesh. This reminds me of the PR messages from cable companies trying to prevent the deployment of municipal broadband.

[1]: And highly illegal...

No way to batch the transactions, because they need to be online to validate the card. While you could potentially batch card-stripe data for later use, (1) you shouldn't even build that capability into your POS system because it would be a major hacking vector, and (2) you can't do so with chip data since the chip needs to be there to perform a calculation with its embedded key.

You're right that disrupting wifi is easy enough, if such an attack actually became common, it's also easy to detect what/who is causing the disruption if you have reason to look for such. Or even easier to just hard-wire your POS terminal.

Offline chip and pin transactions are possible and are also used (at least in Europe). Due to security reasons they are usually only used for lower amounts and IIRC there's a maximum total amount that the chip is willing to sign without an online transaction in between. See https://www.aciworldwide.com/-/media/files/collateral/trends... for some additional information.

> you can't do so with chip data since the chip needs to be there to perform a calculation with its embedded key.

EMV has optional offline modes, where the calculations performed by the chip are saved by the terminal to be sent later.

> No way to batch the transactions, because they need to be online to validate the card. While you could potentially batch card-stripe data for later use, (1) you shouldn't even build that capability into your POS system because it would be a major hacking vector

Is this your opinion as an end user thinking about the system from first principles, or the actual consensus of the industry about how things actually work?

A quick Google for 'offline credit card transaction' brings up a huge number of links to POS vendors explaining how to do exactly this, as far as I can tell. Is it referring to something different?

Square has an offline mode that does this. Cards are queued up and authed when the device goes back online. The merchant accepts liability for declines, but it's a good deal in exchange for being able to run their business in remote locations or during some kind of outage. It has to be explicitly enabled so you can't just trigger it by knocking out WiFi.

Is that legal in US? Poland for example has a law saying that cash must be accepted, refusing cash payments results in immediate fine of about $135

Land of the free. Home of the brave. It’s a “free” country.

In the US, cash must be accepted as payment for (edit: public) debt. However, there is no requirement that all transactions must accept all legal tender. A business owner can refuse to enter into a commercial relationship with you on the basis of your method of payment.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...

It's legal but I believe it requires collecting payment upfront to make enforcement practical. The bus company example is pretty good - you get on the bus and pay how they prefer or you don't ride.

If you ate at a restaurant which had a 'no cash' policy, I'm not sure how you would resolve a situation with a client who was willing to pay in cash only. Would the restaurant be able to refuse your cash and say you ate without paying?

>If you ate at a restaurant which had a 'no cash' policy, I'm not sure how you would resolve a situation with a client who was willing to pay in cash only. Would the restaurant be able to refuse your cash and say you ate without paying?

I doubt it would be too difficult to find another customer who would swipe their own card in exchange for cash from the cash paying customer... free reward points after all. (Infact many people do something similar in India, we receive a fixed allowance which is tax exempt but can only be spent on food, this is given via a special debit card or vouchers. You pay for someone else's food using the voucher and take cash from them)

Legality seems to depend on the state, e.g. https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/03/paying-cash-...

In general though, probably yes so long as it's stated in advance. And there are certainly many situations where you wouldn't expect to be able to use cash; I can't mail Amazon a stack of bills.

Yes it's legal.

Are online retailers in Poland required to take cash?

A clean, legal way to refuse service to anyone without a credit card.

The named stores are also "healthy" options, so we have decided as a society that bankers decide who eats healthy food, even if the buyer has US legal tender?

fwiw they take debit cards, and there are services like bluebird [1] that provide a bank account + debit card (iirc) without a credit check.

but I agree with the spirit of your post.

[1] https://www.bluebird.com/

Even these services have restrictions. For instance, the service you linked to says in its FAQ that it's only available to non-minor US residents with a valid SSN and a working email account. Cash has none of these restrictions, and it's not hard to imagine scenarios where they are relevant.

They seem to require an address. How do I give money to a homeless person to use at one of these stores?

Can I buy a handful of Blue Dot cards at the drugstore, load them up with about $5 or $10, and hand them out?

Some people don't make enough money to open bank accounts, because their money is gone before the next paycheck.

You can buy prepaid Visa and MasterCard gift cards, that function exactly the same as credit cards at point-of-sale terminals, in places like CVS and gas stations.

Those cards typically have high fees. So another way to leech off the poor.

Qui prodest?

It is quite apparent why CC companies offer $10k in rewards: they will keep commissions on all transactions.

Anecdote: recently I bought a used car. Initially we agreed on bank transaction, tried several banks, some have low limits so low it would take months to move money. Others wanted transaction fee as high as $200 on 20k transaction.

Gov wants to get rid of cash because of surveillance. Banks and CC companies want to be gatekeepers and tell you what you can and can not do with your money. And to pocket as much fees as possible...

Not only do they get commissions, but for the merchants, people historically pay more with Cards than with cash

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-science-behind-beha...

I had the same situation in the UK a few years ago, the bank would not accept 25k in Euro or sterling; then when it came to electronic transfer, bank to bank, the bank would not guarantee the validity of the transaction for 8 weeks. Made the sale of the vehicle a little scary

It is worrying that the US would move to a cashless society with credit cards. This is already a reality in the Netherlands and other countries in the EU, but with debit payments being the vast majority, which also have much, much lower fees. Handing off 2-3% of all transactions to Visa/MasterCard is just insane.

Growing up in Brazil I got used to preferring card payments over cash, I never carried more than the equivalent of 30 USD(usually around 10-15 USD) on me because of the constant danger of being robbed.

Most places accept credit cards and most of the time I carried cash for cab fare only. When Uber got started I could finally carry close to no cash on me, after a few months Uber ordered its drivers in Brazil to accept cash and was welcomed with a lot of protest from their drivers because doing so would threaten their safety.

The annoying thing about cash isn't the cash, it's change. Coins are awful. They're heavy, they take too long to count, and they have no buying power. I will frequently abandon change because I would rather lose money than deal with it / not purchase things at places that have minimums or are cash only.

I understand why users are concerned about this trend, but if you're going to be working with cash you need to round your prices to the nearest dollar and take tax into consideration when doing it.

Seriously? You'd rather round items up to the nearest dollar, so you spend a maximum of $5 more when buying ten items, than to just leave the extra change to the cashier?

Of all the suboptimal solutions...

Edge case. How many times have you done business at a place that is cash only where you bought more than a few items? The majority of the time rounding up is a great solution because it means the cashier doesn't waste time counting change and doesn't have to account for revenue not matching sales. Having a count thar does not come out cleanly at the end of the day is a major inconvenience depending on the business.

> How many times have you done business at a place that is cash only where you bought more than a few items?

Literally every time, but I don't live in the US.

> Having a count thar does not come out cleanly at the end of the day is a major inconvenience depending on the business.

Then round up at the end of the sum.

>They're heavy, they take too long to count, and they have no buying power.

Depends on the currency. In Europe--both pounds and Euros--coins are pretty significant. Of the currencies I use, it's mostly the US where change is often a small denomination annoyance because, for whatever reason, we collectively decided some time around 1950 that we were never again going to change either the paper money or coin denominations in wide use.

We pay cash for most non-fixed costs in our house so we collect a lot of change. We put the quarters and dimes it in one big milk jug and the nickels and pennies in another. Once every few months we take the quarters and dimes out and roll them up and that doesn't take too long. With the pennies and nickels we just pay the ~10% counting fee to Coin Star.

No fee if you get an Amazon gift card

You might check with your bank on counting the coins. My credit union provides counting machines as a free service.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

> Visa recently offered select merchants a $10,000 reward for depriving customers of their right to pay by the method of their choice. A Visa executive described this practice to CNN as offering shoppers “freedom from carrying cash.”

This is and should be treated as an attack on US currency. It's not treated as such, because Visa sells its product to US gov as trackable and easy to control alternative to cash.

Visa gets duopoly for payments. Government gets citizen spending profile. Citizen gets "freedom from carrying cash".

I was floored by the doublespeak in their statement. Freedom from cash?? I already have that. This is freedom to collect fees for visa.

I rarely use cash these days, mainly due to laziness, and I like the fact that I can use some software to track all of my transactions across accounts so can rationalise my spending habits and commitments.

Cash has that feature too but much more cumbersome to track, and comes with the additional burden of coins.

Reading the comments in this post, I can understand the reasons why people would find this trend concerning, but I'm not really sure what you can do to stem the tide. For example in the UK the use of contactless credit/debit cards used for transactions went up by 147% between April 2016 to 17 [1]

I suspect the trend will keep rising, contactless will probably soon overtake the smaller transactions (< £30) paid in cash.

[1] http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/contactless_contactl...

After living in Germany, I can't go anywhere without cash. It's like walking out the door without my keys.

And when you're in Berlin, whenever you see your bank's ATM, you know you must get some cash. Soon you'll need it and the nearest ATM is broken, so you must spend a considerable time to find another one.

As someone not in $BIG_TECH_CITY is this something folks are seeing elsewhere or this just another one of those problems only "coastal elites" have? Since I not only use cash for all purchases, but actively refuse to use a card this is a concerning trend.

I have only seen it in major cities for now, but the trend will accelerate for all of the reasons given in the article. With chains like McDonalds replacing a large portion of the cashiers with automated ordering kiosks the next big push will be in marginalizing cash purchases and increasing the inconvenience (e.g. ten kiosks available or you can wait in a line five deep to order and pay with cash), but within a decade I can see the option for cash purchases being the exception and not the rule. It will happen much like the ongoing transition to the expectation that you will be carrying some sort of mobile device.

Once it hits the economic repressed areas, where the majority of folks don't have debit cards or bank accounts this will run into an issue.

There is a very large and growing set of folks in this nation who use cash and barter only.

I suspect at least some businesses everywhere in the US will move to this model in the next few years. Handling cash is a big logistical risk, and the only question is how many cash-only customers can you afford to turn away? And from my own non-coastal non-big-city observations, cash-only customers are fewer and fewer, and largely of demographics that some businesses (but not all) would be perfectly happy to have a reason to refuse service.

But cash won't go away anytime soon. You just might have to skip dining at the latest fast-casual chain or indie coffeeshop to come to your town.

As a coastal elite (NYC), this is primarily a problem you'd see in famcy new gentrifying places. (Off the top of my head I can think of a salad place near Wall Street and a craft espresso place in the overpriced food court of a brand new mall in Brooklyn.)

Your average bodega still has a $5 or $10 credit card minimum, and street food vendors, the bagel place I went to yesterday, etc. continue to be cash-only.

One of the problems I have noticed while using cash is the dearth of "change". In case of a digital transaction, restaurants can simply swipe and charge the exact amount. But, when it comes to cash they ask for "exact" change.

Which makes me wonder, are we running out of coins or something? Or is it some marketing tick that pricing has to be non-zero, odd numbers to increase sales and that makes tendering change difficult?

I think it's a throughput thing. Lines are long at places in midtown Manhattan. Counting out change takes longer than waiting for the transaction to clear and offering a receipt.

horrible trend it is pretty realistic to imagine an attack that cripples major payment processing networks

In France, it’s technically illegal to pay more than €1000 cash for anything. Because terrorism. Though I suspect it’s really because of extremely high rates of tax evasion. Anytime a worker does anything at my house, there is always the quiet option of “sans facture” which means taxes are avoided for the purchase, but also it allows the worker to pretend he never received that income for income tax purposes. There is seemingly a dual economy — an unintended consequence (though completely foreseeable) of confiscacatory tax policy. If the tax rate were 10%, fewer people would bother evading and tax revenues would logically increase (per the Laffer Curve.)

> If the tax rate were 10%, fewer people would bother evading and tax revenues would logically increase (per the Laffer Curve.)

No, they don’t logically increase. We just tried that experiment in Kansas, and it failed badly. They ended up reversing tax cuts since revenue took a beating.

Don't credit card companies charge a fee, which you can avoid by accepting cash? Is that charge usually worth avoiding the hassle of handling cash?

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