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While true, the Lady at the desk still would not have let them pass. and once the plane is gone...

Yeah, certainly, there isn't much they could do than complain afterwards (probably fruitlessly), sadly.

Businesses should be required by law to accept cash for in-person transactions. Philadelphia was the first US city to ban cashless stores a couple of years ago and it was a great move for convenience and equity.

I agree with the former, but not the latter. It's fine if stores accept credit cards, as long as they accept cash too. Hell, I wouldn't be against adding the cc fee on top of the price, so cash users don't need to subsidize cc users.

You misunderstand. Banning cashless stores does not mean banning cashless transactions altogether. It means requiring cash payments to be an option.

> cash users don't need to subsidize cc users.

I doubt this is the case; it's easy to see the costs associated with taking a credit card because they are all upfront - e.g. a card may charge 1-5% plus a fixed fee.

However the costs associated with cash happen after the transaction and are extensive: * Cost of the time spent 'cashing up' - i.e. reconciling the cash in a till with the transactions made, * Cost of the time spent taking cash to a bank, or the direct cost for a cash collection business, * Losses due to mistakes in making change, * Losses due to fake currency, * Losses due to staff-theft, * Losses due to robbery,

I can imagine these easily adding up to some small percentage of the costs of accepting cash, comparable to the cost of a CC transaction.

1-5% of every transaction and bigger transactions have a bigger cut taken. With cash a lot of those things you mention are rare events and I'd imagine decent insurance covers or pretty much fixed costs. Credit cards also have problems with customers using stolen CCs, doing fraudulent chargebacks, machines go down etc. It's pretty well known that the high transaction fees needed for CC companies to offer rewards like cashback do impact prices and cash users are effectively subsidizing CC users.

In the US, maybe. EU Regulation caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards, although most member States have set lower fee caps.

It's always more expensive to handle cash here. Business plans usually estimate the total cash handling cost to be 2.5%, compared to 1% for cars payments.

The world is bigger than the US and the EU. The poster I replied to also mentioned 1-5% transaction fees which kinda suggests they weren't talking about the EU...

True, but Ryanair is an EU-based airline (and obviously Berlin is in the EU).

I think it's very dependent on the business. In a couple of minutes research I saw one site which estimated the average CC cost to be 2.08 USD versus 0.30 USD for cash, whilst another site estimated the cost of cash handling to be anything between 4.7-15.3% of the money taken in [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180130005244/en/New...]

(I think CC costs are also likely lower in Europe - cashback credit cards are less common/rewarding, debit cards are a lot more common)

Handling cash isn’t free either, and is worse in that you need to physically transport it. It’s also pretty dirty.

As long as you don’t care about things like employee theft, increase risk of robberies, etc. If the government is concerned about “equity” it should set up banks for the unbanked.

"First-world" countries require banks to provide free accounts to people who can't afford the standard fees. Maybe you should be working towards that instead of banning cashless stores.

> The airport is absolutely in the wrong here.

Nitpick-- it is a RyanAir policy, not an airport policy.

RyanAir was absolutely in the wrong here.

I've been burned one time too many by RyanAir's deceptive pricing schemes.

Ah, right. I'm not sure whose fault it was, as eg the gate is the responsibility of the airport (and, if I recall correctly, has airport employees, rather than airline).

The staff at the gate is often (not always; sometimes they’re airline employees) a ground handling company contracted by the airline. They do their job based on the policies of the airlines when it comes to ticketing, rebooking, luggage rules, etc.

More generally, whenever the words "RyanAir" and "fault" show up in the same sentence/extended phrase, in 99% of the cases the "fault" is directly connected to "RyanAir", no matter who the other subjects of that extended phrase might be (clients, airports, even government entities). Though they (RyanAir) sure do have some very cheap flights, that's why lots of us accept being their reluctant clients.

To be fair to RyanAir, they’re extremely upfront that they’re a budget carrier and they even joke about their fees and things on social media. It seems pretty honest to me. You get what they say you’ll get.

While Euros are legal tender in the Eurozone, only France enforces universal acceptance. The only bloc-wide requirement is that public entities providing essential services to citizens cannot refuse cash payments without sufficient reason.

I'm pretty sure more countrys have similar laws. For example every place in Germany has to accept cash.

  Except when paying with more then 50 coins
  Except when paying with coins over 200€ (bills are fine)
  Except when clearly contractually precluded beforehand.

That’s certainly not true in Germany. Even when German plaintiffs brought a case against the German broadcaster Hessische Rundfunk in the CJEU (2010/191/EU), the court ruled that cash payments could be limited in the public interest even to public entities (although they did uphold the plaintiffs right to pay in cash in that case).

Wherever you are quoting from almost certainly applies to creditors, not vendors in general.

I know that case, and you are right. However, no normal vendor would fall under the "public interest" argument made by the courts.

Normal vendors are not required by the Regulation to accept cash, only public entities.

Only France has a national law requiring universal acceptance. There is no such EU requirement.

Morally you are right and I agree with you, I think it's utterly repugnant that the airline won't accept cash in a context where there's no reason not to and the situation is so stressful for the passenger.

However, the concept of "legal tender" is very limited and unfortunately could not be used here to put pressure on Ryanair. Cash being legal tender only means that it must be accepted as settlement for an incurred debt, which was not the case here. What's more, I seem to remember that technically it only means it in the context of legal disputes, such that the cash will always settle the debt if deposited at the corresponding court (or something like that).

You're right, I didn't mean that legal tender was applicable here, my point was more that cash is "endorsed" legally, as legal tender, whereas credit cards are just some third-party service.

Card-only is way more common than you think in some countries, northern Europe in particular in my experience.

Cash is not always legal tender. (For example Scottish cash is not legal tender, it’s just accepted by convention.) and anyway ‘legal tender’ doesn’t mean a business has to trade with you if they don’t want to unless they’re settling a debt in court.

I had the exact same experience at the Delta counter in Atlanta. A Frenchman was having trouble understanding that he couldn't pay cash to check his bag. We paid for him (Amex reimburses us for Delta fees so we didn't take his cash) but otherwise he wouldn't have been able to fly.

Previously, I had always believed that in the US it was a law that places had to accept cash.

A number of years ago now, I had some RBS notes in my wallet and a young clerk in a London store told me she couldn't take them. (Her manager quickly came over and corrected her.) I did also have to get some older English paper notes exchanged at a bank for newer plastic ones.

Completely agree but more and more places are refusing cash. Just spent a week in Amsterdam and several places were card-only, and I've noticed that my nearby "card or cash" parking fee machines have had the cash function broken for ages..

Not only that, but a whole load of the services in Amsterdam will only accept Dutch debit cards. Which is just great when you've got a Spanish credit card (that you've used all over the world, just not in Amsterdam...)

Yeah that was really annoying with an Irish credit and debit card in Albert Heijn (and elsewhere) - though at least there I could usually find some way to give them money.

People say this all the time. But it’s not true.

Try checking into a hotel, getting a rental car without a credit card and see how far you get.

Alternatively, try mailing cash to Amazon to buy something.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

> There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise