San Francisco considers banning cashless Amazon stores | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco considers banning cashless Amazon stores

sf.curbed.com

58 pointsprostoalex86 comments

The principle they're being banned on is because they're cashless, not because they're automated. The logic is sound - unbanked people exist, including in San Francisco, and without a bank account these stores are inaccessible.

Presumably ticketed restaurants like Lazy Bear are inaccessible to the unbanked also. Should we ban those next?

Toll roads as well.

Are there toll roads in the US that don't accept cash?

Many toll roads in the US are being switched to automated systems that either scan a device attached to your windshield or license plate, allowing you to either prepay into an account or pay afterward.

> Are there toll roads in the US that don't accept cash?

One example, FastTrack express lanes in the Bay area (unlike the lanes on bridges, there is no cash-accepting substitute.)

Even toll roads without people accepting payment there, can be paid for in cash afterwards, at least in California

https://thetollroads.com/help/faq/386

Looks like one location in Irvine is the only place you can pay cash. So I guess technically yes, practically though?

Oh, and it's open : M-F, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Those specific toll roads are only in Orange County, so having one location in Irvine isn't a big deal. Its not a statewide network.

If you can't buy tickets with cash ... sure, sounds good.

I'm sure Lazy Bear can come up with a coherent way to accept cash, as can all these other stores.

Your argument is a bit lazy though, right? The point is that cash itself says you have to accept it for "all debts public and private" and as an equitable society we have an incentive to make sure that is true. Out of hand dismissals of a coherent argument do not help us learn more; they only serve to make you feel good about being smarter than some other people.

If you go into a store, they can reject you for any reason (unless it's due to being a member of a protected class). Cash must be accepted to settle debts, but if I refuse to serve you, there is no debt. It's legal for stores to say "we don't accept $100 bills" and it's legal to say "we don't accept cash". However, if you eat dinner, THEN pay, you have a debt, and cash must be accepted.

Totally, and that is why I support a ban on cashless stores, to remedy this loophole

Would you also support a ban on stores that don't accept $100 bills? What about stores that refuse to accept payment only in pennies? The issue is in those cases that $100 bills make them targets for robbery and therefore cause undue burden on those stores. In fact, the same could be said of cash in general over other forms of payment. From what I've heard, China's mostly cashless system is a dream for both consumers and stores.

You make a lot of arguments here, most of which I won't touch (especially saying China is "a dream for both consumers and stores").

But to answer your question: no, we should not have 0 bounds on what is acceptable, and there should be some guardrails to make sure that the pedants in all of us don't take over, and that our economy doesn't end up running on pennies (not that they would, that argument is marginal at best). However, not accepting cash is a problem of a different magnitude than not accepting some annoying forms of cash. I support a ban on cashless stores, but, yes, like you pointed out, with some caveats on what they have to support and what they don't.

> cash itself says you have to accept it for "all debts public and private" and as an equitable society we have an incentive to make sure that is true

Restaurants have to accept cash. When you order food you incur a debt. That's what "all debts" on cash means. Buying things in a store is different. No debt is incurred.

Such bans are a cosmetic solution to poverty. They give the illusion of dealing with the problem. But they solve nothing. Prices will be a little higher for all San Franciscans (handling cash, even intermittently, is risky and expensive). Meanwhile, the poor will have no more income or opportunities. But hey, they will have the theoretical ability to buy a plush toy from an Amazon store. (Assuming such stores still make economic sense to deploy.)

Are you asking a policy question, or is this a rhetorical question and you're making a point that there are already cases where not taking cash is an accepted practice?

I don't see a need to ban it because it's fairly unlikely that someone can both afford a Lazy Bear ticket and also be unbanked.

But if you take the nuance out of this question and forced me to choose, then yes, I would say that Lazy Bear should be required to offer a cash-based way to buy tickets.

Yes. Accept cash, or do business elsewhere.

The deontological argument is that there is a rule requiring vendors to accept cash, whereas there isn't a rule limiting the max price they can charge.

I, too, find it easier to apply consequentialism, but bureaucracies work well when they have clear rules.

I don't see this as a problem. Stores that take cash will get more business.

Cashless stores don't have cash handling expenses. Without social coordination business isn't necessarily incentivized to include unbanked customers.

This makes sense.

Why is it hard for these stores to process cash in some way? Why not just have the ability to put cash into a machine in the store and spit out an anonymous account? (asking seriously)

Dealing with cash is expensive. You physically have to move it and protect it from getting stolen by thieves and even employees.

Well, you need a cell phone to even get in, so that would likely have to change too. And then they'd need one of those complicated self-checkout kiosks where you tell how you're paying. Someone would have to deal with all the physical cash (and checks?). And at that point, you're just Walgreens.

I 100% get the logic, but for progress to happen we unfortunately need to break some norms. Like, Uber also requires a phone and doesn't accept cash... if they had to do both of those, they'd just be taxis.

This is easily solved with cash machines that reload value onto an Amazon card. They could have those at the entrance and then you can shop only up to the limit of the amount loaded on the card.

Then the practical solution is to pass a law requiring them to have a machine to load a card with, not banning them outright.

This policy is needlessly destructive.

Typical Silicon Valley Catholic Church-style moral scorched Earth approach.

Could you please not post this kind of flamebait and comment substantively instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They'd only ban cashless stores, if Amazon would offer the option you suggest, they wouldn't be cashless anymore, and therefore allowed.

That is reasonable but it might also be more than Amazon's willing to bear. It costs money to handle cash and it's more work to stock and flush these machines. Amazon may have a business case for these stores that depends on paying the relatively small merchant fee to credit card networks and knowing that they don't have any burden of handling any cash.

If you read the article carefully, no one is suggesting banning what you propose (though a machine that makes exact change at checkout seems better).

The article is clickbait.

> the practical solution is to pass a law requiring them to have a machine to load a card with

This wouldn't work with Amazon's grab-and-go vision. If someone loads $5 of cash on a card and walks out with $20 of product, what do you do?

AFAIK these stores employ security/loss-prevention (and stockers as well, just not cashiers). There’s people at the door in the videos I saw. How do they stop people from stealing?

Security is enforced inbound. You can't enter without an account. You can grab "anything" you want and it's charged to the account.

Same thing as when someone walks in with no cash or card and walks out with $20 worth of product, probably.

People who avoid banking by choice will might not go for a card to load cash with. To them, that's going to look like a bank.

Should the same principle apply to Uber, AirBnB, Instacart, Lime, Netflix and other operators?

Yep.

> Brown decided Amazon should hire a few people to accept cash at its brick-and-mortar stores.

I'm pretty sure we have machines that can take cash and give change /s. Anyway, I'm skeptical of how many people can manage living without a bank account in SF.

Are landlords accepting cash for payment? I checked and at least you can technically pay property taxes and traffic citations with cash (it may be a big hassle but it is possible). I'm still skeptical that besides cashless stores SF is 'friendly' to the bankless. And technically, don't you pay with the Amazon Go app? You could, in theory, buy Amazon Gift cards with cash (ironically at a different store) and then pay with an Amazon account. If anything, I would complain that these stores require a smartphone and the Amazon Go app just to enter the store. I think this is a larger barier than a bank account and has far more privacy implications.

> Anyway, I'm skeptical of how many people can manage living without a bank account in SF.

Plenty. Most of us step over their belongings on the way to work and try to avoid eye contact.

> Are landlords accepting cash for payment?

Money orders.

I don't even keep a checkbook anymore. The one vendor that doesn't take cards gets a money order once a month.

> without a bank account these stores are inaccessible

So the solution is to ban cashless stores instead of creating a banking option for the poor?

> So the solution is to ban cashless stores instead of creating a banking option for the poor?

Why not both? Those both seem like good ideas to me.

> The logic is sound - unbanked people exist, including in San Francisco, and without a bank account these stores are inaccessible.

Wouldn't it be better to solve the root cause instead of the symptoms?

Give residents a legal right to open a bank account - as it's for example the case in some European countries (e.g., in Austria banks are required by law to provide at least a "basic" bank account to people that don't have any other bank account at another bank).

With this approach the stores would still be inaccessible to unbanked people - but everyone would have the choice to become "banked", even if they have a bad credit history, etc.

> Give residents a legal right to open a bank account

Simpler: make it a requirement that the banks the city does business with have to offer free no-fee checking to city residents. ("Does business with" meaning issues bonds, holds deposits, does tax refunds, manages pensions, et cetera through.)

Requiring vendors sell a commercial product to anyone is legally tricky. It also adds yet another convoluted cost to launching a new bank in the city. That adds incumbency bias to an already monstrously incumbency-biased banking system.

There is a root cause fix - it's legal tender. Systems exist that accept legal tender in an automated way. The preservation of the bearer value of cash money is a more important principle than the preservation of amazon's marginal efficiency.

The fix is from the past. Cashless has lots of advantages, i don’t think 300 years from now money will be paper. (It wasn’t 300 years ago either). Technology changes, we should keep up with the times.

> i don’t think 300 years from now money will be paper. (It wasn’t 300 years ago either).

Paper money is well over 1,000 years old, though it only became popular in Europe, IIRC, a little over 400 years ago.

Not everyone wants a bank account.

According to Brown, as many as 50 percent of black and Latino households in San Francisco go without a bank account

This stat is hard to believe. Does anybody have a link to the actual study? Most national studies (like the FDIC one) put this number around 5%. My wife works in the restaurant industry, and most all of the illegal immigrants have bank accounts, smart phones, use direct deposit, etc.

According to the article, the data the city is using is from 2005. It is likely access has increased in the past 14 years.

The article doesn’t link to the study and I can’t find it. “As many as” could mean anywhere from 1 to 50%. Smells like deception, but I could be wrong.

There's a PDF (https://prosperitynow.org/sites/default/files/resources/Bank...) that says that an analysis with those figures was done by Matt Fellowes at the Brookings Institute, which is interesting because it doesn't mention any polling or details, so who knows how those numbers were generated.

Thanks! Their numbers seem to be far off from the FDIC studies, despite them claiming they corroborate national averages.

Looking at the FDIC study from 2009, ~20% of Black/Hispanic households in California were unbanked, and when looking at citizens the number is ~7%.

The FDIC puts the overall unbanked percentage at 6.5%, and "this number" (black and Latino households) at 15-20%. The 50% number is outdated but still, it's a sizable percentage.

The recent attempts at banning cashless stores is addressing the symptoms without considering the root cause. The two main reasons to ban cashless stores revolve around privacy and access to the un/underbanked. Privacy is a legitimate concern, but what are we doing to solve the crisis of folks who don't have access to a bank? There are some policy papers floating around regarding postal banking and programs of a similar nature, but none of these proposals are getting legislative traction.

Instead of worrying about a store that gets very little foot traffic lets worry about the homeless encampments, human poop, needles, piss bottles etc. that flood the city.

I agree, if there is a huge shift in stores to cashless we have a possible issue at hand if the unbanked are truly that high. BUT I don't see this kind of shift in stores anytime soon.

There are a lot bigger problems to tackle in this city that none of city government wants to take on. But sure lets spend time talking about these Amazon stores.

Don't pay attention to this. It's a political side-show by a Supervisor trying to rally her base.

This is in the same vein as the "ban corporate cafeterias" shenanigans last year. It won't fix anything and the politicians yammering about it don't actually care about this.

It's all a game.

The real solution, of course, isn't saving jobs that don't pay enough money to actually live in the city. It's building housing. But that's politically difficult, so we get this.

This is not an isolated political stunt. A lot of cities and states are now enacting similar measures.

This is dumb. Imagine there's a totally cashless economy that keeps out the unbanked. But then a merchant could price gouge the unbanked. But then there'd be competition for this high margin unbanked business. But then the merchants would compete for the unbanked by lowering their margins. But then equilibrium would be hitting the unbanked up for precisely the inconvenience overhead of dealing with cash. Unless unless unless someone interferes with the market in a regulatory way. Or gets impatient waiting for the inefficiency to right itself. Sheesh.

Can't they place a machine in the stores where people can deposit cash and get a loaded card to purchase things with?

Cash is legal tender and should always be a possible method of purchase at physical locations.

The whole premise of Amazon stores is to just grab stuff off the shelf and leave.

If someone feeds $1 into the machine and gets a loaded card, can they just walk out with $20 worth of merch? With a credit card you just get charged for whatever you took and you pay later.

That seems easy enough to me. That isn't any different than an arcade where you put $5 into a machine and they give you tokens for the game machines. Except instead of tokens they would give you a temporary card.

FWIW, more and more cities are trying to ban cashless stores. Philadelphia became the first city to ban cashless stores citywide earlier this month [1]. Would be interesting to see if NYC and SF both ban them as well.

[1] https://www.phillyvoice.com/philadelphia-ban-cashless-stores...

How about solving this through store credit cards? Put a machine outside Amazon store. Insert cash -> Get loaded card. Sorted!

There are so many unbanked people in the U.S. that I wonder whether local governments should step in to address the problem, because the private market has clearly failed to serve these people.

> There are so many unbanked people in the U.S.

How many?

> local governments should step in to address the problem

What do you suggest they do?

https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/

8.4M unbanked people. A publicly-owned bank might do them a lot of good, especially in areas that are underserved by credit unions.

IIRC they were trying to start a public bank in LA but they didn't get the votes.

They came close. The public banking movement is growing pretty quickly and there is a statewide bill in CA to allow for cities to establish one.

You can't open a bank account without a social security number. Pew estimates ~250,000 illegal immigrants in the Bay Area, so that's a big chunk of people right there blocked out of banking by policy.

https://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/unauthorized-immigr...

I’ve been to that store and it’s clearly a test bed, not a real store. There are employees who stand there and answer questions. The ceiling has hundreds of cameras which I assume they plan to use for some sort of AI tracking to determine who took what. For the time being, I’d bet they are mechanical turning it, since there is a 10 minute delay between leaving the store and being charged.

So the problem isn't a lack of cashiers but a lack of cash. It seems like the problem could be solved by having a few smartphone-like devices that you can shop on and take to an automated cash machine at the end. Then you'd just need a supervisor to make sure people weren't walking off with the merch, which they probably have anyway.

Is there any limit to what laws cities are authorized pass? I'm surprised this is even legal. If you push the reasoning further, could they also ban ATMs? Banks? Uber, AirBnB, Eat24, any cashless service? To be honest, I feel like this has more to do with protecting local merchants than protecting the unbanked.

I don't disagree really, but I thought Amazon had a service where you could add to your Amazon wallet using cash?

How are you going to add cash to your amazon wallet (let alone use it), if you don't have a smartphone?

Store kiosk?

They give you a barcode that you can use to fill your wallet.

From the article it comes down to an equity issue; some people do not have cashless service and that means they cannot shop at an Amazon store. If it's true that 50% of black and latino families go without a bank account, banning cashless stores feels like the equity equivalent of banning plastic straws.

This is exactly one of the problems we as a crypto ATM company solve. Allows a lot of unbanked folks to convert the little cash they earn to digital currency or cards. You wouldn’t believe the reasons why people can’t get bank accounts...

I don't see how cryptocurrency solves this - if you exchange your cash for a cryptocurrency then there are even fewer ways to spend it than when it was cash.

If you exchange your cash for (say) a Visa gift card or some similar reloadable card then you can use it wherever Visa works, which is many places (a lot of which would also accept cash) including online stores.

And if the laws are changing to prevent cashless stores from existing then you can just keep your cash as cash.

Makes a lot of sense, you have to accept cash unless you want to give out for free.

So they’re going to shut down Blue Bottle too?

That's ridiculous. Why should Amazon even care about selling to people that only have cash ?

Just add one cashier.

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