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Comment by crawl_soever | Hacker News Reader

How about making it compulsory to accept legal tender for events /races and other things? How many times do you sign up to run a race and are forced to purchase through vendors like "Event Dog" or other where paying cash is not even an option. And these companies always tack on up to 10$ "convenience fees" that are unavoidable. In places like Canada where currency is legal tender you can avoid these scummy vendors by paying the merchant cash directly

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I don't think you have an operating understanding of legal tender. No widely-applicable law in Canada or the US requires businesses to accept bank notes to settle a transaction. See e.g. https://globalnews.ca/news/6878824/legal-for-businesses-to-r... and https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm . Some municipalities and states have added laws requiring cash acceptance, but it's not as simple as "it's legal tender" or "you can do it in Canada."

I think the sentiment is understandable if the terminology isn't precise. Don't charge fees for non-optional things. Especially don't charge a fee to pay the posted price.

Just an example of a large municipality doing this: In NYC food establishments must accept cash as of November 2020

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/new-york-city-cash-law-...

I missed that this happened, that's great news. When I saw a few places get away with no longer accepting cash "for the convenience of our customers and the security of our staff," I figured that it was only a matter of time until everywhere else that wasn't doing light tax fraud followed suit.

Tangentially, I'm also pleasantly surprised how easy it still is to buy a physical MetroCard. My understanding a few years back was that contactless payment would be the default by now and if I wanted to buy a physical MetroCard, I'd no longer be able to do that at stations but I would instead need to go to "select retail partners" to do so.

As a consumer, this is great.

As a guy who used to have to take a zipper bag full of cash to the office safe every night, the convenience of the customer part may be laughable but the safety of the staff part isn't. Offhand I can't think of a more effective way to bring back 1990s mugging culture.

There's a difference between the letter of the law and the word of the law. Having experienced both places I can say there is a difference in how things are run and regulated and if they call it legal tender or whatever it doesn't matter. As a customer it does matter because I end up paying the junk fees so please don't patronize me for saying it.

My county government got in bed with InvoiceCloud and prominently offers the payment option that includes a service fee when paying my property taxes. (The service fee for last half was ~$350.) It's still possible to pay via fee-less bank transfer for now, but the website says in the future I'll need to pay in person by check to avoid fees. This is instead of the original method of receiving paper property bills and sending a check in return.

The website was designed by contractors paid for by tax dollars unassociated with InvoiceCloud.

These are similar problems - billing and payment can be difficult problems due to the way the industry operates. But the trend towards making it more inconvenient (or in some cases, impossible) to pay by any other means that does not include a price gouging service fee is not adding value for consumers.

Then they would add a "cash fee." Just ban the junk fees altogether.

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