One might wish that were true, but I am seeing a disturbing proliferation of "no cash accepted" signs here in Seattle.
Is that even legal? I thought retailers must accept all legal forms of tender.
This is such a misconception that the federal reserve has a page on it.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
>There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.
The federal reserve addresses state/local laws:
>Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.
These laws are new and only exist in a few locales.
The laws are new because the practice they react against is, generally speaking, a recent problem.
I'm seeing more cashless stores in my area and it disturbs me. Hopefully my state can adopt a similar law. I am also increasingly seeing cash prices versus card prices. I'm more inclined to pay cash for smaller shops where 3% matters to their bottom line. Plus it's always good to have a dollar on hand for buskers.
Not to mention the reduced risk of miscounting/counterfeit currency, or robbery.
The only advantage is if you want to scam the irs.
Legally no one has to accept cash except for "debts, public and private". If a business is selling you something, they can stipulate any form of payment since it isn't a "debt".
And yet, I can't pay my mortgage off with a briefcase of cash.
I think this has a lot of caveats too. Not least of which hide behind "KYC" and anti money laundering laws
I won't worry too much about the word "off" since paying early is a fussy contract thing.
Otherwise, have you tried? I'm pretty doubtful they can refuse.
Try renting a car or hotel without a credit card.
Also debit cards are typically used by poorer people who are riskier for them.
Debit cards save them on processing so they would prefer it if all else were equal. They’re not all stupid so the reasons must be sound.
Few people here have credit cards, so everyone accepts debit. That includes Hertz.
Credit cards have limits, too, just the same as debit cards.
Again, let's look at the last time I rented: you can't do what you're suggesting, as such a charge would be (instantly) declined.
> They can’t do that with a debit card if you don’t have enough in the account, it will reject.
Ironically, it is more likely to decline on the credit card we gave them, than on the debit card we were trying to give them; the limit on the debit card is higher (since it's backed by cash, and not credit…)
> they can charge the arbitrary amount of damage you do to the car
(This would have been a specific violation of the contract we had with them, as the car was insured with them. But I do understand some people insure through their personal auto, but even there, the matter is going to need to be settled via the insurance.)
The way car rental works is that they put a "hold" on some credit amount. So they would know at rental time if your card is too limited and will decline to loan you anything.
Your contract with them probably gives them the right to do this.
I don’t know what to tell you, these are the reasons. They don’t just want to pay an extra 2.5% processing.
As a general rule, you can assume if all the players in a large and competitive field do the same thing, and it doesn’t make sense to you, and the alternative you think is better is both obvious and easy to implement, then it’s because they know something you don’t. I assure you, major car rental cos know everything they need to about the difference between debit and credit cards.
(Even still, I don't think "has credit card" is a good proxy for credit worthiness.)
“Has credit card” is obviously a coarse filter, just as creditworthiness is a coarse filter for “won’t wreck my car” but I’d bet you anything you’d see at least a 150 pt FICO spread between people who pay for things with debit vs credit. There’s only one reason to use a debit card and not get the rewards of credit (assuming the price of either is the same) and that’s that you cannot be trusted by a bank and/or yourself to not spend money you don’t have. This is particularly exacerbated with car rentals in particular since so many credit cards include car rental insurance, making it significantly more expensive (either in immediate cash or expected value of risk) to use debit.
And, “doesn’t have a credit card” is actually a pretty good proxy for either “not creditworthy” or “some kind of weirdo”, with neither of these being the people you want to let use your $25,000 car for $250”.
I think Stripe's way of doing things is better because it's inline with the actual expenses they incurr. To their servers, there's no difference between a $1000 purchase and a $1 purchase. The cost to them remains the same so the transaction fee should account for that cost. Let the customer figure out how to eliminate that cost without hiding it from them.
Scaling by purchase amount subsidizes smaller purchases, but it allows merchants to take way more money than needed to process the transaction from larger transactions and most people don't even know that it's there and that they are paying significantly more money for an item than they need to.
All these card rewards just waste people's time and in the end, the house always wins. This whole reward game is a direct result of this percentage merchant system and I'd rather not have it.
App stores provide, among other things, the CDN for app downloads and updates.
I don't know about you, but damn near every app on my phone is getting updates multiple times a week. That bandwidth, and the architecture to provide it at scale up to "hundreds of millions of devices", is not free.
Google, for example, provides a massive toolkit of functions and services as part of the Play Store that's not built-in to Android itself. Both companies provide an entire development environment for free. Etc.
Also not free is the infrastructure to run the stores, nor provide security and quality review services. Apple does a lot of automated and human inspection of apps, and while it's not perfect in many ways (and perfect is an impossible standard anyway) it's still an important, valuable service that costs a fuckton of money to run.
Credit card networks mostly just pass transactions around, with some fraud stuff. Almost everything is handled by the processors and banks.
Really, the problem here is that credit cards don't have competition from wire transfer services that are common in the EU, for example. For decades it's been possible to instantly pay another person or a merchant for a product or service and them to see the transfer happened. Zelle is the only thing that comes close in the US, and it was started by a couple of large banks who were fed up with the lack of modernization of the US wire transfer system. We're the laughing stock of the world, taking days for a wire transfer to go through...
If someone gets my Card and Pin I don’t get back that money; at least not easily. But if someone steals my credit card I get that money back immediately.
I travel quite a bit so I am aware that credit cards don’t work like that everywhere. But, for US issued credit cards the fraud protection alone make them hard to beat.
Not great for the merchant though.
They already did, as well as the expertise, so the extra expense is not large in relation.