1.) have a cashbox (or multiple)
2.) guard cashbox
3.) every evening count money in cashbox
4.) hope the cash you took in is still in the cashbox
5.) if not 4) --> accounting nightmare + fire employee
6.) bring cash to bank
1.) have a terminal that supports all the different card types
2.) guard the IT infrastructure according to the PCI rules (have you ever needed to implement those, especially for small shop owners with no IT know-how)
3.) every day/week/month accounting of the payments to the corresponding receipts
4.) hope that the customer doesn't initiate a reimbursement
5.) if not 4) --> accounting nightmare + loss of the reimbursed money
6.) spending weekends (small business) for the required IT infrastructure
is this really necessary? AFAIK it's only necessary if you handle credit card numbers, which you don't, and can be outsourced to the payment processor so you're not seeing credit card numbers at all.
>3.) every day/week/month accounting of the payments to the corresponding receipts
this can't be handled by the POS software?
>4.) hope that the customer doesn't initiate a reimbursement
probably not a big issue with card present purchases
Many businesses can't afford to offer credit card transactions because they would be extremely expensive.
2) Why does the seller have to guard the payment processor's IT infrastructure?
3) Certainly faster than counting cash on top of counting the reciepts.
4) The problem doesn't exactly lie in the cash less system. Dealing with complaint is your business' problem.
5) Reversing 1 entry isnt a nightmare.
6) Are you developing your own solution or something?
It might be good to know as well that charge backs in the EU are not as common or easy as in the US.
Cash gets more and more expensive (exponentially) on the amount of money (security, deposition etc.). On electronic cash it's like a flat line.
- If I'm doing a large cash business then the next $5+ costs me basically nothing.
- However if I'm doing a mostly credit card business, the next $5 will cost me the same as the first $5.
With that, I think the analysis you read was funded by payment processors.
But to correct myself: This 5€ break even is on a macroeconomic level on all parties. Cash is more expensive on this level when you spend more than 5€ on a single transaction.
Just one example of the other party: the end consumer also cannot get cash for free (even when he get's it free from the ATM, there are costs the bank has and maybe you pay them indirectly).
EDIT: Downvotes in HN are not a dissenting mechanism; they are there to bury inappropriate/misleading/etc. comments (not that I particularly care, but it seems a proper opportunity to clarify a misconception).
And nonetheless you were initially asking why would anyone join a bank that charged them ATM fees; the answer is that it might still make financial sense or be convenient for people. We are discussing about why there is a sizable population for which ATM withdrawal fees makes them prefer paying by card; you can of course "blame the victim" and say that it is the fault of those people not choosing the proper back. But it is just avoiding the topic, which is: this is a problem when travelling to Germany, and it I not a problem when travelling elsewhere in Europe.
For example, a spanish Santander card is free in the 4B network, but you will be charged on the german Santander ATM, as it is another ATM network (the Cash Group).
Not necessarily. Here in Latvia banks manage their own ATMs and whether you will have to pay a fee depends on your bank having a contract with the bank whose ATMs you're trying to use (usually there is no fee for taking money out of your bank's ATMs with a few exceptions, i.e. my bank has a 10% fee on withdrawals from credit cards, though most have debit cards anyway).
Who do you think is paying to run that ATM?
PG stated very early on in HN's history that downvoting to signal disagreement is reasonable [1], and that's been generally accepted as a guiding principle in the community ever since (though it's not in the guidelines, so it's a matter of individual preference).
What is in the guidelines is this: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." [2].
How can the community learn about the rules if we should not point to or discuss the rules? If it were not for my comment, you would not have pointed that to me :)
A good starting point, aside from keeping familiar with the guidelines themselves, is to follow dang's and sctb's comment threads, where issues like this are discussed freqquently. That's how I keep up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb
The reason not to comment on things like voting behaviour is that it takes discussions away from their primary topic and into the territory of being repetitive, uninteresting, and sometimes resentful and hostile. Of course that can never be avoided altogether, but it can and should be minimised :)