Have you never walked into a store and they said you can't use a CC because their reader is down? It is nice to have a few dollars in your pocket for times like that.
Plurality of payment methods is always more desirable and more robust. If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale.
The ability to negotiate and adapt is what makes the world go round.
One example; I was caught in an emergency needing to get a taxi to an airport. On the way I explained the situation to the driver, and ended up negotiating the fare as a mix of US dollars, Danish Kroners, and a good bottle of wine, where the official expected currency was Euros.
The problem comes with cashiers and managers who are not business owners and are terrified to do anything unusual. They are tied to procedural rote and unable to think dynamically. It's all about what they can't do even when evidently agreeable and favourable options are on the table.
For some businesses, the overall cost of accepting some of those methods may be higher than the expected revenue from customers who won't use another method. Buying new payment readers. Having to convert the bitcoin immediately to currency to avoid losing money due to its constant price fluctuations. Higher per-transaction fees for some types of payment. Increased susceptibility to fraud (for cheques in particular).
> The problem comes with cashiers and managers who are not business owners and are terrified to do anything unusual. They are tied to procedural rote and unable to think dynamically.
You would be too if you were barely making ends meet, the expected outcome for "a customer asked me to accept an unusual form of payment" was almost always "it was a con, the 'customer' got the merchandise/service for free", and you'd most likely be fired as a result.
Just the millionth example of why trust is a critical component in society. Its presence allows things to be flexible and efficient. Lack of it makes things suck for everyone.
Well, all other significant concerns aside, NFTs are not fungible, it is literally in the name. Transactions are made through fungible methods.
Example: a $10 bill is exactly the same as any other $10 other bill or the same as having a $10 in your bank account. Same applies to BTC, any bitcoin is an equivalent of any other BTC.
This fungibility is what gives them the baseline feasibility as a common transaction method. Fungibility is just one of the many requirements for something to be useful as a common transaction vehicle, but it is one of the most fundamental ones, and if it isn’t satisfied, the rest of it doesn’t really matter. Sure, BTC is too volatile to be useful for transaction purposes in a lot of cases, but volatility is further up the chain of concerns, and BTC indeed satisfies the fungibility requirement. Sure, common AAPL shares are fungible as well, there is exactly zero difference between shares of AAPL that you can buy and the ones i can buy, but they aren’t fit as a common transaction method for many other reasons too.
Meanwhile, any given NFT is not an equivalent to any other NFT. They are explicitly intended to be unique and non-fungible/non-replaceable. There is no price for 1 NFT, just like there is no price for 1 painting, each NFT and painting is their own non-fungible entity. So everything else aside, NFTs are explicitly and by their definition are hard-disqualified to be a common transaction medium on the very fundamental level. In contrast, BTC doesn’t have such fundamental problems, but more in terms of practical problems (transaction speeds, transaction costs, high volatility, etc.)
It wasn't that they couldn't think about creative solutions, it's that we generally didn't want them to. There were serious implications for wrong decisions. For example, we couldn't sell a product for less than wholesale. The staff had no idea what the markup was and so couldn't know if a discount was above or below wholesale. If a product was sole for less than wholesale, the owner could have lost his license.
The wildest we got was when the computers crapped out. I told the staff to write down every transaction. Each transaction included the cost of the item, bottle deposit, and tax. On a Friday/Saturday night, we knew the top 10 item totals by heart and we were also good at counting back change.
When I was a regular run of the mill staffer at the store, I was happy to stay in my lane. The expectations were clear and that was good for everyone even if we, or customers, were sometimes inconvenienced.
I also was in your similar example. In US I have a car, so very rarely I use public transport which is not Bart. I landed in Toronto at 2am, got into Bus Google Maps told me, Bus driver said $2.50 fare, cash only. I gave him American 3 dollars, and he gave me Canadian $0.50 change back.
Now that many cards no longer use raised numbers I expect such mechanisms wouldn’t work as well.
They said their payment terminals were down so they could not take credit cards. I said oh... I don't have any cash, oh well no coffee for me. They said well... we can comp you one drink per person if you don't have cash.
Neither I nor they considered the option of me walking over to the nearby bank ATM and withdrawing cash.
If a store's CC reader is down, then I'm just plain not transacting their that day. That's fine: there are other stores.