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I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash.

With digital payments you see exactly how much the payments cost. Swipe fee + processing fee, and it isn't fun as a business owner to see ~3% of your money going to a bank.

With cash, it takes some effort to tally the costs. Cash handling equipment: POS, safes, bill counters for larger merchants, etc... Then you have to add the amount of time your employees spend on cash: counting drawers at the start, counting drawers at the end, managers counting money into and out of the safe, managers taking cash to the bank, or hiring a service to do that, cash goes missing through malice and negligence, etc...

Dealing with it a register was a pain to say the least. You'll constantly have people demanding change in particular notes etc.

You often have to watch out for people insisting they handed you a 50 so they can scam you into more change. Or get chewed out by someone for the wrong change when really they just dropped the note on the way back to their car. None of that can happen with a card.

The card payments are nearly atomic, you paid or you didn't. In a year doing the work I only once had someone claim a card payment took the wrong amount and it was a very dubious claim.

For cash i'd often I'd have to call a manager to request more cash for the float. Because the older customer base would spend their morning queueing outside at an ATM the buy the smallest cheapest thing to get change, which they only needed to pay another businesses that only dealt in cash.

It goes without saying my views are biased from dealing with cash paying people.

I’ve had a theory for many years that incorrect decisions are often made simply because the cost or benefit of one option is tangible and that of another aren’t.

For instance employers underpay employees because the cost of paying your employees more is easy to calculate but the cost of not doing so (turnover, etc.) is real but hard to determine.

Another one in the same vein is bad hiring processes. It is somewhat easy to tell when you hired the wrong person. It is close to impossible to know if you passed on the right person.

Yeah that’s why everyone in software just says “no false positives”. I don’t think they really do anything differently, but they think they do.

And yet, there are lots of businesses that give a discount for cash specifically because of that 3% fee. Yes, I know the standard trope is that it's so they can avoid taxes and in some cases that's surely true. But, for many, if not most businesses, there are way too many paper trails for the IRS (or whatever the taxman is called in your country) to follow that would make that difficult to pull off at any worthwhile scale.

If I had to guess why some businesses do this I would speculate on two things:

1. Like I said, there are a lot of indirect costs with cash, and a lot of businesses are just bad at calculating these things (a surprising number of business owners are REALLY bad with money and valuing time). For example, an owner managed business might not value or care about the owner having to count and make trips to the bank.

2. Something in the nature of the business favors cash. For example, if your average transaction value is < $5 and you are running 100+ swipes per day, the fixed swipe fees of $.10-$.30 are going to HURT (think convenience store). Another example might be low/no margin stuff like gasoline, gas is the loss leader for stations hoping you'll buy a snack with a huge margin, so they offer a cash discount since it is cheaper for them AND you have to go into the store, which increases the chance of an impulse buy.

Someone with average transaction value of > $100 who only runs ten transactions a day isn't that worried about losing a dollar to swipe fees in exchange for not having to keep thousands on premise at the end of the day (think car mechanic).

One is the cost they are used to (the cost of managing cash), the other is the new outrageous cost (card processing fees, cost of the machines, etc)

> I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash.

Then powerful trade organizations should lobby for introducing a system of digital payments that offers at least the same level of anonymity as cash.

Why would they lobby for that?

Merchants don't particularly care about the anonymity of cash. Most merchants are rather fond of collecting data about their customers.

Then they can't resell your data.

Governments won’t let it happen. Cash is the only solution.

It' s the cost of doing business. With cashless you need a POS, digital infrastructure, the bank takes a cut, Visa takes a cut, no cell service or too many people on a cell means not doing business, doubled payments mean headaches for both cashiers and customers.

> I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is.

If the expense is that big of a problem, then stores could put in a surcharge for using cash. I'd pay it. It would be well worth it to avoid having to use cards.

This would almost certainly cause a substantial public backlash that would outweigh the benefit.

I would settle for accepting Monero in lieu of accepting cash payments.

These are all very good reasons why a business may not want to accept cash. Cash adds a lot of overhead and security risks that can completely negate any savings gained by not having to pay credit card fees.

The problem is that if enough businesses stop accepting cash, then it becomes nigh impossible to participate in society if you can only pay in cash. Which can be a big problem in the US, where not everyone has access to credit cards or free checking accounts.

This is why I support regulation that requires businesses to accept cash. Yes, it adds overhead. But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.

An alternative might be regulation ensuring people have access to banking services, either privately or by the government offering these services directly

I'm biased here, but a basic electronic income seems like a solution to me.

> But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.

Forcing banks and digital wallet providers to provide users a prepaid card/digital balance in exchange for cash is a good alternative. This should be a part of the charter/license under which such organisations operate.

That doesn't address the issue of all the tracking and data collection that comes with using cards, though. That crap is why I prefer to use cash.

Here in the US most of the stores with that many cashiers are grocery stores and have become increasingly automated via "self checkout", and they're still perfectly capable of accepting cash - it's like an ATM machine, and far more challenging to rob with a gun.

The locale I've most encountered the cashless shift has been Santa Monica, not at the grocery stores with tons of cashiers, but at small restaurants and such where they've embraced cashless and in many cases menu-less as well. It's outright hostile to find yourself socializing there without a phone and just a wad of cash. And it should be made illegal IMNSHO, as these are public spaces operating with a business license discriminating against those without credit cards and/or smartphones. This is private members-only club levels of B.S.

Portland is another locale I've been affected by this BTW.

All this about the costs of dealing with cash are true. But they're especially true for the big players.

I've seen several shops (including small coffee and ice cream places) telling people more or less openly that they prefer cash. Because card companies take a margin on every transaction, and don't allow them to charge more to compensate. Some try to go around the other way (offering e.g. a 5% discount to people paying cash - I had this at a restaurant). The problem is that the big ones can negotiate lower transaction fees with the card companies...

I suspect some of it's a tax thing as it's a lot harder to hide income when all your transactions are digital.

hypocrisy on my part but I have probably benefitted from paying cash for handiwork done that was only cheap because the person might not have paid tax.

If you get paid cash and give a receipt/cash ticket, I'm not sure you can avoid declaring that revenue to the tax authorities. It's enough that one of your customers uses that ticket to deduce it as a professional expense from their own tax declaration to get potentially caught.

I was hearing that all the time before card payments were a common thing (i.e. in the '80s, writing from Europe), "didn't get a receipt... they want to avoid taxes"

I mean yeah, if you give out a receipt as any sort of tradesman you're probably going to have to report that income or risk tax evasion prosecution. I have personally never had a tradesman give me a receipt, always cash-in-hand, for anything at home. Work expenses a receipt is required though, and those I pay with card anyway.

I don't know about that. I mean there are not many places (at least around here) that don't use cash registers. Nothing eliminates fraud but just because it's cash doesn't make it obvious or foolproof.

At the same time, we often hear of ludicrous ways to try and beat the tax authority. I'm sure people try often enough.

The costs are just one side of it. A good reason to accept both cash and cards is that customers like that. No doubt it would be cheaper to stock only one brand of cereals and yet nobody does that.

If this is the argument, though, then it's a good one to let the market sort out. If customers have a strong enough preference for cash that it outweighs the costs, businesses can figure this out and accept cash.

Different stores can have different options in terms of how they handle cash. Costco only has one kind of toilet paper. Target has 10. There are pluses and minuses that they can weigh themselves.

It's one argument but yes and no.

I was thinking it's one argument for the store that has the OPTION to go cashless and might not - just so as to serve more customers.

But the store is not deciding on its own. For example if costs are pushed by outside forces too far one way or the other. Say, if the tax authority makes it hell to accept cash. Well then the store does not really have the option. The decision has been made for them.

> cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change.

You could, if there were just more uptake of digital payments by individuals. In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now. There are beggars in parts of sub-Saharan Africa who use the local very developed mobile-payments infrastructure.

>In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now.

This is true -- street beggars in China typically have printed and laminated QR codes to make contributions easier.

This comes with additional complications in the US—for instance, you can be booted off SSI if you have too much income for the month. We functionally have mandatory poverty in this country for folks on disability.

There are huge risks to operating any sort of physical retail establishment, well beyond managing the change in the tills. This doesn't mean the world would be better served if all retail happened online. The risks are worth the rewards.

>well beyond managing the change in the tills.

It's not small change though.

Shop lifters are an issue but weight limits the value of what they could steal. The shop doesn't have to pay for an armored truck to deliver the milk, a regular truck works fine because we don't have armed milk robbers.

There are risks in physical retail far beyond managing the shoplifting problem as well. In fact, theft of all sorts is only a small portion of the risk-pie here.

Card is a permanent %2+ tax, how does it compare?

See my sibling comment, but it is hard to quantify how much cash costs because a lot of the costs are indirect or infrequent capital costs. Things like employee time, and money handling equipment. It will also vary enormously based on the scale and nature of the business.

A small coffee shop can get by with a $129 cash drawer hooked up to an iPad and a manager spending a few hours per week counting money and visiting the bank. A large store like Walmart can easily spend $100k+ on all of the equipment for cash handling in addition to having to contract with an armored car company.

Note that "a few hours per week" for the manager costs perhaps $30/hour total compensation. That's more than the price of that drawer, every week.

Over a year, it's perhaps 4 hours/week x $30/hour x 52 weeks/year, which comes to over $6,000. That's real money for a small coffee shop.

Fine, so why they won't let us pay with anonymous cards? All the benefit of cashless without surrendering your privacy roghts. But no, they insist that every card be registered, identity scrupulously verified. Because terrorism, think of the children and what not.