Frustrated visitors sue National Park Service over cashless policy | Hacker News Reader

Frustrated visitors sue National Park Service over cashless policy

sfgate.com

21 pointswalterbell16 comments

> In one news release regarding the cashless policy at Death Valley, the park service said that the $22,000 in cash collected by the park during the previous year took more than $40,000 to process.

> “Cash handling costs include an armored car contract to transport cash and park rangers’ time counting money and processing paperwork,” the Park Service wrote in the news release. “The transition to cashless payments will allow the NPS to redirect the $40,000 previously spent processing cash to directly benefit park visitors.”

Strange but true:

While small businesses prefer cash, large businesses don't because there are many hidden costs to handling *large* amounts of cash regularly. Grocery stores know this, which is why they offer "cash back," so they can minimize the amount of cash they have to handle. Counting cash and contracting and armored vehicle are not free.

In the park situation, I wonder if it would be legal to charge differential pricing: instead of $10, they would charge $19 to cover cash handling costs (which means they would get $40,000 in revenues and break even). On the other hand, this might trigger another lawsuit because folks don't realize cash handling fees can be more expensive than credit card fees.

I'm sure $38k of that $40k was the armored car contract, which is insane for such small amounts - less than $500/week.

I'm kind of stunned they didn't have any random entrance employee run a bag down to the bank once a week/month. Send them home an hour early to do it. It's what we used to do in retail, banks have unattended drops for use 24/7.

Death Valley NP is pretty remote, no? “Run a bag down to the bank” is probably a significant errand.

To add to this Death Valley is bigger than Delaware. It has multiple entrances that are over 90 minutes apart. To visit all of them and then and then get to the nearest bank could be half a day if not a whole day.

I would not be surprised if there is some government regulation that is making this more complicated than it needs to be, but its a tough problem reguardless.

Thanks for writing this, I was wondering how it would be possible to have such a large loss when handling cash.

Do other larger establishments just have a better system by way of scale? For example, I imagine cash is a significant portion of Walmart's transactions. How are they able to pull cash from thousands of locations all over the country and securely deposit it, but a handful of parks can't?

I have little experience with this, but interested in how it works or how it could work better.

in alaska we have vehicle stickers.

pay the state stick it on and use parks.

Most museums in London are free. It's wonderful. Decide to go on a whim, and stay for 5 minutes or 5 hours.

It works better than anything I've ever seen at a park or museum in the US.

The Smithsonian museums in DC are all free. They are truly wonderful. I've probably spent two weeks in them over a few vacations.

That's a little over $420 a week. If they need to spend $40k on armored transport and counting, something is wrong with their policies and procedures, not the cash.

Seems like it would make a lot more sense to just make the park free?

I think there are problems with the cashless society, government, tyranny aside. I would be OK with a place charging me more to pay with cash, or less, but businesses of a certain size should be required to take cash.

How much are the plaintiffs seeking?

From another article:

> "They seek no monetary award," he said, adding that "Children’s Health Defense is financially backing the lawsuit."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/experience/national-pa...

That's fine then. From the article linked above, it feels pretty unambiguous in terms of the law. Requiring a credit card makes accessibility to our parks more difficult.

I can't be certain because I'm not a lawyer, but I think if you sue the government like this, and you win, the government pays your legal fees. So the government will probably have to pay out, at least in that regard.

I wonder whether the number of people who still want to pay cash would be small enough, that park rangers don't end up with a lot of cash to get rid of, nor need costly cash-handling procedures, nor have a safety problem.

For example, if nearby rural businesses prefer cash, such as due to low-9s uptime of electronic connectivity, maybe the rangers could use a petty cash fund for official purposes.

Or some park service locations could offer a service of "cash back" to visitors with debit/credit cards, when cash on hand permits. This sounds odd and off-mission, but this would be the US gov't symbolically showing that US currency works in every corner of the nation, even when getting back to nature, where electronics can be less reliable.

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