Considering that many people only read headlines, I'd support a movement for becoming more accurate even with headlines.
"In Sweden, some worry about the cashless society" would be way more apt.
It must be very small. The only person I've ever heard complain about it is... myself. Not for the reasons this article gives, though. I'm more upset about Visa and Mastercard skimming 1% of profit off of the entire country's retail commerce. Maybe if they weren't simultaneously terrible, but they also have unimaginably bad fraud detection, and push their own fraud problems onto local businesses.
A cashless country should just use the tax money on cash printing factories to cover the cost of transaction.
However, I am not a payment expert, so there might be an additional fee imposed by the credit card networks which I am not aware of?
This percentage does seem a bit more reasonable for the services offered by Visa and Mastercard, in my eyes.
As the other response to my comment said, cash itself has an overhead cost, too. But that cost is paid to our government at break-even cost, instead of to a private company for profit.
If Visa and Mastercard had plenty of competition, it wouldn't be so bad. Swish is nice to have, despite its problems. Maybe we'll get there.
[1] https://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/erhverv/Pages/mobilepay-myshop.as...
[2] Well, I say "crowns" in English
So a grocer that accepts Swish payments will in no way be hindered by this limit, unless they for some ungodly reason are also swishing money back to customers.
Magstripe transactions, non-EU cards, and non-consumer credit cards have higher rates.
Could be similar in Sweden.
It's about an opposing opinion to the cashless trend that we're already used to.
You might not know anyone who shares the opinion but I do, several of them.
Personally I share the opinion on an ideological level but practically I'm just too lazy to make a real change in my life.
I have friends who always swing by the ATM before we go out, while I pay for everything on my cards.
But the real issue here is that if we rely 100% on an electronic method of payment we'll be more crippled than necessary if some calamity would befall our society.
I have not made any comment about opinions about cash, whether I know someone who is has concerns about the lack of cash, or about my own standpoint.
In general terms, I feel like you about the topic: "Personally I share the opinion on an ideological level but practically I'm just too lazy to make a real change in my life."
That, however, can hardly be called "turning against cashlessness" :)
I 100% share this sentiment. The only times I use cash is when I travel to the US.
It is true you can get by without cash in Sweden but you cannot get by without a card, reasonably. But many of the corner markets have minimum payments by card, and so often having smallish money in cash is a very good thing. Additionally the farmer markets in the town squares are still mostly cash-based.
So I never found cashlessness to work entirely while I was there, whether I was in Malmo, Helsingborg, or Landskrona. Maybe in Stockholm it is different, and maybe it is different if you rarely buy at the farmer markets....
Germany, where I now live is the opposite. You can get by without a card, but you cannot get by without cash....
You might be cashless within your little tech circle, but it appears there are many more people who are uneasy with the idea.
It's totally possible to embrace the cashless lifestyle while being uneasy with it at the same time. I argue this actually is the norm. Like it is with a lot of stuff we do on the web as well. Who isn't uneasy with all the social media platforms but still uses some of them.
It's the new normal. Being uneasy with things and doing them.
The trend is most definitely towards cashless, not away from it.
I'd be very surprised if a drug dealer accepted Swish/Mobilepay.
If you go to a legal brothel in Nevada, it doesn't show up on your credit card with the brothel's name. It shows up as some bland innocuous looking generic company name like "ARB, Inc."