UK Shops can refuse to take cash even though it's legal tender (2023)
fullfact.org
fullfact.org
With that said, I was traveling outside of America and found retailers charging a fee for using a phone to pay. That irks me. Government is pushing for a cashless society, but some retailers still preferring cash and penalizing when you pay by card. I have seen this in the States but not nearly as much abroad until recently.
I have the usual personal reasons:
- I don't like individualized tracking,
- there's no backup solution if my stuff gets stolen (10 years ago my bank card stopped working during a trip to Germany. I borrowed cash from friends for the rest of the trip and paid them back)
- I'm dependent on a single bank (I've wondered if I should open an account at a second bank)
- It depends on an international network to always work, which doesn't seem to be true even here.
- More abstractly, since the SWIFT system depends on the US, US laws get to decide who cannot have a bank account, as when the US recently classified a couple of Swedes as terrorists.
I also have a problem because my eldest is old enough to go places on his own, but many years before he'll get a bank card or smart phone. Some of the places which no longer accept cash are public toilets (card only), the local minigolf course, and the swimming pool.
When I was that age, my Mom would give enough money to go somewhere and be able to pay for a ticket and maybe a snack or soda.
In a cashless culture, I don't see how my kids will have that level of independence from us until they are old enough to have a bank card.
My eldest still loses his library card about half the time, so that's not going to be soon, and their first phones - which will not be smartphones - won't be for years.
Retailes charge a fee for digital payments because the payment provider charges them a fee, for example 25 cents + a percentage per transaction, + the cost or lease of the payment terminal and / or software; if it's small purchases like a drink or takeaway food, that's a significant percentage. Second, small retailers / sellers may prefer cash, because cash is untaxed as long as you don't log / report all your transactions.
Basically, it's a mixed bag. Cash means you can avoid taxes if you don't digitally log / report all your sales, but it means you're a higher risk for robbery.
Legal tender in UK legally only affects repayment of debts: they are obliged to accept legal tender for repayment of a debt, within reason. So you can always pay by cash e.g. if you eat in a restaurant, legally, as you are indebted to them after eating your meal; although they don't need to make it easy, you'll have to have a day in court to enforce this in practice.
Nobody's obliged to offer goods for cash, so you have no obligations in a shop, unless they gave it to you on credit.
However, there is no obligation to take when paying ahead of time, e.g., when ordering at a takeout counter, or otherwise as part of the offer and acceptance process, which is how all over the counter retail sales are characterized for legal purposes.
The only restrictions are on denominations, e.g., a business is not obligated to accept more than X coins of type T, etc.
"One has no recourse should one refuse to accept cash in settlement of the debt", or something like that.
:->
1) it's missing the (2023)
2) it is/was about the UK (the title omits that)
3) it was a (factually misleading) FB post from July 2023. Refusing cash in a [UK] shop is not an "offence". It may well be annoying customer policy, but not a criminal offence. The article itself says as much. So a more reasonable title would have been: "Is it legal for UK shops to refuse to accept cash? (2023)"
And in the past when I've tried to alter titles to be "more reasonable" they've been changed back, so I've given up trying to be helpful.
Wow. So do stories about the USA have to mention that too?
There is an incompatibility between title clarity and HN guidelines about keeping the original article title, and it gets worse the more vague or misleading that article title was (which is not the OP's fault). In such extreme cases we should probably editorialize the title with the missing bits to remove ambiguity. I haven't been active on HN too long but I believe this discussion has been revisited many times.
I had asked about this because I had "Scottish Money" while in London back then. In England people can refuse to take it because paper money in Scotland is issed by many Banks as opposed to the Gov. He said they really had no real way to determine if those bills are real. Each bank had their own design.
Decades later and with this article, I wonder is Scotland still has their own bills.
It probably shouldn't be legal to decline legal tender because it is absolutely not legal to accept any other form of payment than pound sterling.
That is largely for tax reasons, if I pay you in pokemon cards, what's the VAT on that and how do I give it to HRMC? Not possible. People like to argue that private businesses can do whatever they like but that's simply untrue.
They can decline cash, but they must take payment in pounds and pence somehow.
I understand why they wouldn't want to deal with cash as it makes transactions faster and you don't have to deal with taking your cash to the bank (or an expensive courier) but, as the article mentions, it affects the poorest and least technically literate in society disproportionately.
You can accept anything you like, however if you are running a shop then good luck working it out with HMRC if you take Pokémon cards as payment.
Why does it affect the poorest disproportionately?
1. People who are "less well off" (i.e. poor) often can't get a credit card, because they've failed to pay off their balance on credit cards in the past, and their credit is shot.
2. Paying for things in cash is an effective budgeting technique. When you run out of your "spending money" (i.e. money not set aside for bills and necessities), then you can't spend any more, because you literally have no more money in your wallet.
3. Many poor people don't have bank accounts (possibly to avoid overdraft fees, and possibly because they don't trust banks), so they cash all their checks and pay for everything in cash.
4. In general, they tend to use check cashing places instead, feeling that the benefit of having a bank account isn't worth the hassle when they make so little money. & Even honest one-off jobs may pay in cash.
The situation is going to be different for different people, but it's often some combination of the above.
An estimated 9 million people (of 70million) in the UK use this type of account.
This mitigates 1, 2, 3, 4.
They just need to value it in sterling for tax purposes.