Hacker News Reader

Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com