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smileysteve

I don't buy this because it discounts the high costs of cash controls.

Cash has high costs that likely make electronic forms of payment competitive.

You have

- Employees skimming the till;

- Theft insurance for a safe, the nightly amount in the safe

- Managers balancing the cash registers with change/safe

- Armored trucks picking up the money (2-3 men guarding the transfer)

- Banks processing the money

- Employee time and frustration ensuring they didn't come up short

tldr; It takes one armed robbery or employee malfeasance before ~2% fees seem very much worth it to reduce cash on hand.

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> Employee time and frustration they didn't come up short

To add to this, back when I was a retail cashier in high school, there was also the threat of having too much money in the register. Either by negligence, due to miscounting a customer's change, or of outright malevolence (by doing the same). Before I even began training at the register, I was told by the store manager that if the cash in my drawer at the end of my shift was over the amount that the transaction history specified I should have (I believe this was > ~$5 lifetime? It's been a few years so I'm foggy as to the exact figure) that I would be let go.

Now, I don't mean to bring this up to debate the point one way or the other, just that it is yet another friction to managing cash as opposed to credit cards.

It’s an indicator of skimming gone awry. When I worked at a bagel shop, a common transaction was $4.03. Seeing cash coming out, the cashier would subtotal (sending the ticket down to print), and cancel/no sale the transaction.

They would do it 10 times and pull $40.

Not really. 2% on your gross is a lot and any standard commercial policy will cover cash on hand.

50% of the country is broke, 80% live pay check to pay check.

Many working minimum wage, low income bracket do not have bank accounts.

The idea that cash is ‘hard to operate’ is a stretch, we’ve been exchanging currency for as long as commerce existed. If you handle enough cash to need an armored truck, you are far above most businesses in processing.

There are a few places in NYC that do not take cash, and they exist in their own micro economy revolving around serving lunch.

>50% of the country is broke

what is meant by this? is this the often cited "50% of Americans don't have any savings" number?

in savings accounts only

>Some 50.8 million households or 43% of households can’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill, according to an analysis of U.S. government data released this month by the United Way Alice Project, a nonprofit based in Cedar Knolls, N.J. that aims to highlight the number of people who live in poverty.

I'm going to assume they grossly overestimated when creating that number. Their aim is "to highlight the number of people who live in poverty". I think I am technically "poor" by a number of standards because I don't have any money in a savings account because I prefer higher yield investments.

Methodology described here [1] if you want to go beyond assuming their result is essentially a lie. In the per-state data [2] you see results like 31-32% below ALICE in the Dakotas, but 47-49% in NY and California. If one wanted to present a partisan hit piece to encourage establishment liberal/"Great Society" safety net policies, this would appear to be the opposite of what you would want to produce.

[1] https://www.unitedwayalice.org/methodology [2] https://www.unitedwayalice.org/in-the-us

The big one there that jumps out at me is "child care", in terms of things that are somewhat discretionary (in the sense that stay-at-home parenting is a thing). And at $10-30k per year per child depending on where you are in the US, it's a pretty large-ticket item.

Well let’s take me. Stay at home parenting... assumes I make enough money to cover her, the child, and her retirement, and medical. Which is 70-80k that she is providing right now. So We either take an 80k hit or 30k hit.

It’s pretty simple these days. I’m pushing a household income of close to 200k and I haven’t been on vacation in 3 years.

I could make a shitload sure, drop the wife, move into a studio and eat ramen.

If there's even a single 70-80k income involved, then I expect that household is no longer in the "can’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill" bucket, unless it's insisting on living in a specific location with very high housing costs.

All I was saying above is that I am not surprised that a large fraction of households _are_ in that bucket as defined in the United Way report, because child care is expensive. And I expect the fraction of households in that bucket would likely be a lot smaller if "child care" were not being included in basic life necessities.

I am not going to comment on your personal financial situation; you are obviously a better judge of that than I am! I certainly know people with 200k household incomes who also have significant fixed expenses (student loans, medical expenses, whatever) that lead to them not having as much disposable income as one might think. But that's not really related to the United Way study.

Especially in the grocery business. Where I use to work our margin was 2%. Grocery stores are very tight.

I spoke to dell today. 2% margin is even worse on larger amounts. They will provide 3-6 month interest free loans just to keep me from swiping the AMEX. We are talking about 200k worth of hardware.

I wouldn’t buy things with cash if there where a half way decent debit card or similar I could replace it with.

It needs to have real transaction authentication so I don’t have to deal with fraud and it needs to decline transactions when I actually don’t have enough money in the account (instead of charging $40 in fees.) That’s it, but no one seems to offer that so I use cash instead.

You don't have that? Damn Monzo needs to get to the states soon!

Chime? If your balance isn't enough to cover the debit charge, the debit charge is declined, no fees. And you can enable/disable the card in app. And it's part of a fee free ATM network, app finds the nearest free ATM or cash back business.

That sounds almost like what I'm looking for but it sounds like you still have to share an ID number (enough to pull money from the account) with everyone in order to use it.

I can't parse "share an ID number". Anyway, it comes with a debit card with an associated bank account number with ABA so you can do direct deposits to it, and use it for EFT payments to pay bills that don't accept cards. I use the Chime card with locally owned merchants to keep their processing fees down, and as a way to track discretionary spending.

I have a Citicard that generates one time virtual card numbers for online payments. It's a really neat idea but with a painful interface that makes it impractical. I'd like to get a virtual number for each merchant that has a user configurable credit line and can be used multiple times. That way I'd have a unique card on file with each online merchant, with its own credit limit set by me.

Yeah but those costs are more or less fixed. The only way to reduce them is to stop accepting cash entirely.

Also just because cash has costs doesn't mean credit card fees aren't insane. They could be close to 0% if they implemented real security to reduce fraud, and there was actual competition (vendors were allowed to pass fees on to customers).

No, you typically transfer cash from a store once a day, and if 95% of your transactions are card, then you now have only 5% of your takings in your till at the end of the day.

The costs of counting and banking cash are proportional to the amount of cash you take - but the costs of CCTV cameras to point at cash drawers and the driver hours for a single daily armoured car collection are the same regardless of how much money is involved.

If the amount of cash becomes relatively small, then you stop doing collection every day, and also don't bother with an armored car.

The EU legislated down card interchange fees to 0.2/0.3%. I imagine that helped drive the strong adoption of EMV/Chip+PIN and 3DSecure you see in Europe

The costs you mentioned, though they sound physically imposing, do not approach the 2% gross on all transactions charged by card issuers.

In addition, with cash, there is another abstract (collective) benefit. It is anonymous. An entity can neither trail a single dollar bill as it moves through individuals, nor arbitrarily prevent certain individuals from spending. Electronic forms of payment are less free and less secure from a very broad social standpoint.

Going "cash-less" is a growing trend in the restaurant world. I know several restaurant owners that are moving that direction for the reasons you listed. Time is one of the biggest ones, you have to have someone (normally a manager) dedicated to cash management before opening and after closing.

>> Time is one of the biggest ones, you have to have someone (normally a manager) dedicated to cash management before opening and after closing.

When I eat with a group of people, it's very common that I'm the only one who pays cash. It's also very common that taking care of my bill is the fastest of them all. It's easiest on the wait-persons time. But since the owners generally fuck over the wait staff anyway, it's no surprise that they don't care about their time.

In America, paying with cash is so much faster because of the still way too common and outdated process for credit cards: Bring bill to customer > walk away while they review > return to collect card > go to fixed portal to run transaction > return to customer with receipt > walk away again > return to collect receipt with tip amount

More restaurants need to start adopting handheld terminals for waitstaff, which reduces the whole process to 1 step and makes it faster than cash since they do not need to go fetch change.

Also, it helps prevent credit card skimming since you can always see the card which is why I think it is even a law in some countries.

My wife an I frequently eat at a couple places that have touch-screen terminals (I think called Ziosk?) on them. While you're eating, you can use them to order drinks or pay to play tablet games, but you can also pay your bill without any interaction with the wait staff. They're quite the time saver.

Little story: I actually saw one employee at a fast food joint brazenly dig into the till and take a 20 out and put it into his pocket right in front of me. He wasn't a cashier but just someone that assembles the food product.

I once got a call from a co-worker shortly after midnight saying that when she'd cashed up her till, she was twenty down, so then she cashed up my till again (even though I'd done it before leaving) and I also was twenty down.

Didn't hesitate; called the area manager and told him the facts and nothing more. Never saw her again. Don't skim from your co-worker's till.

If this was the case then merchants would happily encourage people to use cards rather than cash.

Outside the US merchants almost invariably encourage the use of cards. Zero places here are cash only (not even a hot dog stand) but tons are explicitly cash free. [edit: in some places.]

The big savings come when you have zero cash to deal with. Then you have no counting/change/armed transport/security issues at all.

That is definitely not true in Germany. There were many places that only accepted cash while I lived there.

I just spent 2 weeks in Spain and there were many places I tried to eat that were cash ø ly.

In Chinatown in London, as well, many places are cash only.

"outside the US" is a big place, be careful to be more specific.

I know - I went to Berlin and noticed Taxis wanted cash and would not accept cards. Was like traveling 20 years back in time.

I did not mean to say all places outside the US

To be fair the only place where I saw taxis accepting cards as a rule was NYC

Practical, still a bit weary though especially without EMV readers

Go to any place in northern Europe and it's basically only card.

Where exactly, because I've been to ask the Scandinavian countries in the past couple of years and I paid taxis with cash in all occasions

For everything else, yes, mostly cards

Well. yeah if you aren't using any app to get a taxi, maybe. Still 90% of Taxis in big cities take card for sure. Even the more sketchy ones have the card machine, but it always seems to "not work" when needed...

Denmark is pretty much only cards, but debit cards at this point, well above 80% for retail is card payments.

I normally have a few may 100 to 200DKK in my vallet, because the credit/debit card system do still fail. I haven't run into anything in the last few years where I could pay with card or mobile payment.

Between my debit card and Mobilepay, I haven't used cash in nearly 2 years living in Copenhagen so I finally ditched my leather bifold wallet and made a slim card holder out of an IKEA bag. It's only been a month or so, but so far no regrets.

It’s come to the point where I wouldn’t even think twice about ordering a hot dog in a stand with no cash on me. It’s 99.99% chance that they accept card, because if they didn’t they couldn’t sell a single hot dog as no one has cash.

That is common with taxis for some reason - probably transaction fees, processing lag time or tax evasion. I know some cities had to pass "broken" card readers are free laws to discourage taxis that claimed to accept cards but really don't.

Yes I think it’s just the taxi drivers who are used to being able to get some tax free money, and now resist complete transparency.

Unfortunately you’ve been lied to.

Since 2015 Berlin taxis (note this doesn’t apply to the rest of Germany) are required by law to accept EC cards and at least 3 different credit card networks (which in practice means Visa, MasterCard and AmEx). If the reader is not operational they‘re comitting a misdemeanor. Best advice is to not pay and ask them call the police if disagree - usually the machines magically start working again.

Why are the drivers lying about it? The fee they‘re paying is relatively high (about 3%, but it‘s somewhat offset by a 1.50€ surcharge) but more commonly they‘re are either trying to avoid taxes and they‘re using someone’s taxi without holding a license themselves.

I visited Stockholm this summer, it was 100% card acceptance, and 25% cash acceptance.

For a counterexample, in the center of Amsterdam many cafes / restaurants are card only.

At the same time, slightly outside the centre of Amsterdam many small takeaway places, hairdressers, etc are cash only.

>I just spent 2 weeks in Spain and there were many places I tried to eat that were cash ø ly.

Where? Was in Barcelona recently, even the 1€ espresso in a random cafe was paid by card.

In villages and even in some bars and restaurants in a regional capital.

Tourist places usually take cards, but the "local" places I was visiting often didn't.

They very much do in Sweden, many places are going cash-free.

There is a push to go cashless in a lot of urban areas.

https://www.dmagazine.com/business-economy/2018/07/why-some-...

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