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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Paying with cash also helps small restaurants and cafes. Instead of having to pay 3% and wait 3-5 days until they get the funds which might get charged back they have the money on the spot. No need for all these middle men taking a cut.

Same goes for Uber eats etc. Call the restaurant directly, don't be a dick.

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Depends where you are (like most of these things.) Where I've lived, card-only isn't uncommon because cash is an expensive hassle for smaller businesses to deal with. Also a potential security risk if it has to be left on-premise overnight.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean credit card, usually it means Maestro or EFTPOS or whatever. These tend to have low fees and function roughly like a near-enough-to-immediate direct credit.

In general, places that don't accept cash will also accept credit card for non-locals, but it's not at all uncommon for (usually smaller) places that accept cash to not accept credit card, even if they do accept the local debit card system, due to the extra expense.

And yet some restaurants in NYC still tried to go cashless. There are real benefits: faster transactions (no change) so faster queues during lunch rush, no risk of robbery, no need for armored vans to transport cash, employee theft becomes much less of a concern.

I think the benefits are compelling. NYC ruled it was a discriminatory practice though, because not everyone has access to banking/credit.

Or you pay the restaurant through direct bank transaction. Credit cards are needlessly expensive, but not all electronic payment systems are.

This has the added benefit, assuming both parties are happy to do it, that the business does not incur the overheads of handling cash, which is also not really free once you take into account things like security and bank fees.

I am firmly of the view that cash is essential as a safeguard and something people should have the option to use, but as we've seen recently here in the UK, modern alternatives like contactless payments using a bank card or one of the phone-based systems can be quick and convenient, and they do not seem to have resulted in a devastating wave of fraud.

There is no means to do this in the US, debts cards have the same fees as credit cards (maybe more?).

This is the core of the problem. In the US, credit card companies have an effective monopoly on the payment infrastructure, and there's not cooperation among banks, and not enough political will, to propose a better system.

In the EU, there's been a lot of regulation over the past couple of decades to improve payment infrastructure. Before that, international payment within the EU used to be awful, and even transferring money from one bank to another within a single country could in some circumstances be bafflingly complex.

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