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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

Visa charges 3%. Everything you buy could be 3% cheaper, that's better than cash back.

Gas is already more than 3% cheaper with cash, rent tends to not accept credit, and for me at least the only significant other expense is dining out. If your goal with a tip is to put $X money in their hand, cash will do that more than 3% more efficiently, saving you the delta.

You can't pay with cash on the Internet, though.

The easy solution is to not buy things on the internet. I can’t think of the last thing I bought online.

(which is a money saving trick in an of itself: if buying X thing requires you to get up and move your body to the store and look at it and pick it up and check out and haul it back, you’re going to buy a lot less things than if all you have to do is move your index finger 0.25mm once. This is why Amazon made with one click purchasing, to the extent people paid amzn for a license to implant “buying it now”)

Not buying things on the Internet is not a great solution for when you want to buy things on the Internet.

Doctor, it hurts when I put a gun to my foot and pull the trigger.

Don’t… do… that…?

But I want to!

Are you lost? Why are you on this website?

Where I'm from you can. There are services that give you a code and then you go to some store that offers the service and hand the cash. Similar to what you can do with Western Union

Cash in the literal sense, sure. But not the practical sense, where it is more a euphemism for “no middleman”.

I pay for things from China using Brazilian Pix quite often.

Not to defend the system, but just FYI to you and whoever reads this:

* the Bilt mastercard will let you pay your rent via ACH and get points for it (for my ~$2k/month rent, I probably get $150 a year)

* There are several cards that will give you 5% cashback on gas

Or since prices are set up by retailers, they'll get extra 3% profit.

Luckily stores are in competition with each other.

That's true for online stores but not necessarily offline, where it's hard to compare prices and it's much more convenient to go to store nearby even if they charge 10% more unless you're buying something expensive.

A lot of offline stores have website with prices.

I'd take my chances with some stores passing on the 3% in cheaper prices (thanks to competition) and others pocketing the profit over the status quo any day.

It'd still be a net win for many people, and the end of what is effectively a redistribution from low-credit to high-credit (i.e. effectively poor to rich).

Not necessarily. Not everyone uses credit cards and not everyone gets cash backs. Effectively those people are subsidizing you, so if you have a generous plan it will be significantly less than 3%.

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