Ridiculous.
Why not also then force cash only businesses into taking card and mobile payments also?
Why not also then force cash only businesses into taking card and mobile payments also?
Taking cash costs money as well: more security, more auditing, more cash transport, higher insurance costs, etc
Even better, because of forced cash now every business incurs those costs even if the overwhelming majority of their transactions aren’t in cash.
The solution to “discrimination against homeless” is not forcing people to take cash, it’s forcing banks to allow homeless people to open bank accounts.
Banks only "work" because they can earn interest on deposits. Homeless people will likely not have enough deposits to make it worth serving them, and they will likely also cost more in support and fraud.
If you compensate them too little, banks will do their best to wriggle out of it or make it inconvenient. If you compensate them too much, they will become predatory in opening homeless accounts. In any case, the incentive structure is all wrong once you try to force the free market in the wrong direction. And who's going to be paying? I hope it's not me.
There is no way this would end well.
Adding a few rows to a database is not expensive. Hell, even saying you can't charge fees to people with less than $X means not making a profit, not taking a giant loss.
The biggest way to stop "fraud" losses as a bank is to stop automatically allowing overdrafts - this is something that banks only do because their "convenience service" of allowing OD automatically is purely a profit making tool and has nothing to do with convenience is that overwhelming majority of cases. Because those tiny overdraft balances incur massive fees and interest that further cost the victims.
https://dharmamerchantservices.com/faq/visa-consumer-interch...
Scroll down and check out the debit rates. 22 cents a transaction for credit union debit cards isn't cheap.
By contrast, allowing direct businesses to not take cash harms a not small section of our society.
Cash laws are about interacting with your grocery, your gas station, your local government, etc.
However, I'm not going to be particularly worried that Gucci has to accept cash transactions to make sure that Walgreen's also has to accept cash.
Somehow, I bet Gucci will be just fine.
There are costs involved in dealing with both forms of payments.
It's a common misconception that arises from state legislatures doing nothing for several decades, but the power is there.
For the record I don't support either and believe it's up to every business to decide what form of payments to accept.
I realise it begs the question a little, the state can mandate cash because it's the state's mandated and controlled medium of exchange, but state power often begs the question.
Any business that is large enough can get their gift cards in retail stores which would be fine. It would definitely create a moral hazard if Netflix had to provide a cash option like this because retail stores would suddenly have crazy amounts of leverage but w/e. But then naturally there would be market need for "accept cash payments for your online service" as a service for smaller businesses that can't just get partnerships with Target and Kroger and the entity providing that service would just be a bank issuing branded prepaid cards but using their own bespoke card network.
Like you can't fight it, you always invent Visa.
You could probably cut card networks out eventually with $as_of_yet_unlaunced_service backed by FedNow but that's not exactly cash and still requires a bank account.
No attack on you, but I feel like lots of people are suffering from not only a lack of imagination, but a serious lapse in memory for the days when they didn't always have a card and not every subscription was an online direct debit arrangement.