Not paying with cash
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?
FeliCa uses mutual authentication with eventual bookkeeping and sync. I believe that there are some theoretical attacks on older cards but the terminals are regularly synchronized and get a ban list. In-practice, you’ll also be reported to the police, probably.
So to execute the double spend you would have to find an authorized card provider, convince them to load and sign your double spend-capable program onto the smartcard (with their signature!), and then be found out within a week when reconciliation is off.
So doing a double spend will be found out, and not only will you be on a bunch of cameras doing the thing, whoever made your card will also have been compromised.
I think that in practice the "eventual" reconciliation is fairly quick nowadays. Just that the offline spend can happen quickly, and then the packet gets sent over the wire maybe a minute later rather than before the spend is approved.
This is definitely the case, and it's also "relatively instant" in the happy path. There are cases like vending machines, or during system outages where the reconciliation happens much later, but those instances are definitely becoming rarer!
...And as you expect it is vulnerable to double spend attacks. Hilariously the vulnerability was revealed in 2014 and nothing has been done to mitigate it. Yes, you can double spend in Taiwan today if you don't mind risking jail time.
From my (rudimentary) understanding of CAP, there is no prefect solution to this. I wonder how Japan handles it.
Much easier than double spending would be to use a student or other reduced fare card.
Before Suica (and a bit concurrently), JNR and later JR issued "orange cards" that included both high value formats and lower value formats. The "high value" cards were 5,000 yen and 10,000 yen respectively, so the new maximum is 2x the previous "high value" orange cards that they abolished.
The real win with e-money is not getting change, in my opinion. Carrying 20,000 yen in cash is easy when it's 2x 10,000 notes, but when it's a mix including coins, it's a pain.
Carry a coinpurse. I use an old faux-suede Samsung camera pouch.[1] Plus it's fun when someone is running an errand for you, like getting you a snack from the konbini across the street, and you plop your coinpurse on the desk with a thud, then pour out a handful of 500-yen coins and say "this should cover it", like a feudal lord.
[1] kinda like this: https://www.amazon.ie/DFVmobile-Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-Closur...
Dumping some coins out of my coinpurse is far superior analog, low-tech Access Control to my money.
Supposedly Pixels have the requisite hardware, but Google software locks the functionality to Japan. Some have been able to hack their Pixels to force it on but from what I’ve gathered it’s flaky when you do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai
I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.
Your android phone likely doesn't have the right NFC tech that iPhones have (google Felica, it's a separate NFC standard used basically only in Japan. Apple builds it into all of their iPhones, most android phones outside of Japan do not). It's mostly just a case of divergent tech, along with Apple being willing to spend money to avoid SKU differentiation/support people traveling in Japan.
https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/welcomesuica/purchase.html
If you go down the "add a pasmo/suica on your phone" then you get into licensing issues with the other cabal (credit card issuers): you need to use an Amex to charge it via Apple Pay (IIRC Visa is now supported, but when I tried it last week my card was declined, so... YMMV).
Same experience with reloading on the physical machines. It’s quite amusing
The only real differences between the Welcome Suica and a regular one are the 500 yen deposit (Welcome Suica doesn't require a deposit) and the limited validity (Welcome Suica automatically expires after about a month).
The visa gift cards work pretty much everywhere, unless they are specifically disabled by the establishment. They do show as a gift card but all the POS systems are perfectly capable of splitting the payment now. I've only seen them disabled at small restaurants that have dealt with scam charge backs and sites like Raise that deal in gift cards and gift card scams as part of their business.
Usually they simply aren't worth it because of the activation fee. It's always more than the highest paying credit card cash back. However sometimes stores, run sales where they waive the activation fee, but there's always a limit.
I believe there is a less limited suica card you can get (not a traveler), but I think you need a japanese address.
You don’t need a Japanese address. Simply visit any Suica vending machine, change the language to English, and purchase anonymous Suica.
There are various preloaded options you can purchase, but typically you cannot recharge e-money via cash.
I though there was a (blue?) one that japanese citizens could get, sent to their address.
No, there are no citizen specific IC cards unless you want extremely esoteric ones, like for senior citizens or children. All of the major nationwide mutual use transportation IC cards are freely available at the stations their operators carry. That's anything in the red box on this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suica#/media/File:ICCard_Conne....
The online, ad infested phone-app-only, less accessible "cashless" systems like paypay.
Even today the only place you can buy food with your pasmo/suica card is at the convenience store. Why is that?
But from a business point if view, cash is super expensive to deal with.
As a side-effect of an acquisition we inherited a small number of customers that paid in cash. Turns out it's expensive to bank that cash, it's a security risk, it's a risk to the person transporting it and so on.
In the general case, if most sales are already by card, the marginal gains of cash transactions are consumed by the cost of dealing with the cash.
I'm not saying stores should be cashless, but it's worth understanding that accepting cash is very much "not free".
I’ve also gotten discounts on large purchases for paying “cash” (check). They effectively deducted the interchange fee from my bill. If cash was so expensive to process, they wouldn’t be doing this.
Fortunately it was little enough that we didn't need a cash-transit vehicle, and it didn't affect our insurance.
Yes, I expect some merchants offer a cash discount, and that can add up for large purchases. But I'd prefer not to be carrying large amounts of cash. (We haven't had checks here for probably 15 years or so.)
We have a very efficient (and cheap) direct deposit system though, so I can pay via my phone straight from my bank app for a very nominal flat fee. So for large transactions that's akin to a cash discount.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2017/03/staff-discussion-paper-2...
You also wanted cash on hand at the time for obvious reasons (all your expenses were in cash) so having it coming in was inherently useful.
I've felt this struggle from the other side working at a gas station attendant. We were only allowed to have $100 before the till made us dump it.
Can you break this $100 bill? Maybe if you pump another $50 in fuel, unless you want this roll of quarters too.
Because tax evasion? Otherwise credit card interchange rates are nowhere that high, typically 3%.
Potentially ranging from 4.7% to over 15%, costs include labor for counting change, closing drawers, preparing deposits, security expenses like armored transport, bank fees for cash services, insuring against significant risks of theft and fraud.
In the end: fairly unimportant... except for that perceived "cost".
this is false reasoning on their part. They never have thought about how much cash costs them so it looks like extra money but it really isn't. they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay, then the time to count the money in the till at the end of the shift. Each count above is 2 counts at best the average is closer to 3 because you sometimes get it wrong. There is also theft costs which is generally ignored but a real problem.
credit cards is money right to the computer which is not only fast it makes less mistakes.
That said, while I default to using Apple Pay for basically...everything, I too do not wish to live in a society where large companies get to govern every transaction I make. Or, for that matter, every transaction I make being on a ledger that the government can monitor.
Do they? Unless the shop's always serving customers, this may be free time.
You also completely discounted the managers time counting cash in the backroom. That is more than an hours work in my experience, time that could be used for other things.
Many of my cash transactions are approximately as fast as or even faster than card transactions.
How this is even legal baffles me
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/Prohibition-of-Cashle...
You can even report establishments for refusing cash by category:
I run a non profit with membership dues and I have tried to just boot the 3% of our membership that pay w/ check or cash annually (I haven’t convinced the rest of the board so we haven’t done it yet). It takes so much extra time to follow it in real life, receive checks in the mail, and effort to deposit in the bank. It’s just not worth the time
Do you get paid from this non-profit you run?
You got me on the rejection part because there are some benefits the members get (being able to attend social events, newsletters, etc) but if your donation is a net negative on an organization, I just don’t think they should donate at all. They don’t know it’s a net negative though and maybe would donate with an electronic payment but possibly don’t know? I think it’s mostly old people doing things the way they are used to
But TBH I’m not sure if much of this matters other than the ratio. Time is money and if there aren’t enough people utilizing something, it’s just not worth it to continue. If it’s a government org that’s possibly the only thing that needs to accept all forms of payment
All I can do is try to keep that share of cash users up through my own action, and talk about what I am doing to encourage other people to do likewise, in hopes that business owners will continue to see cash as a normal part of their operation worth maintaining, and not as an oddball nuisance.
First, cash makes me really think about what I'm buying. It doesn't poke you the same way when you tap a card... which is obviously one of the main reasons they want you do use cards. When I use cash, I am reminded of when I didn't have a lot, which keeps me from spending without thought.
Next, its a hallmark of the middle class to spend money that you don't have. Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance... I do not want to be one of those people. When you use cash, its stupidly easy to know if you have the money or not.
Its also easier to do social activities when you have cash. Need to split a tab, here's the money. I'll buy the next round, heres the cash.
Also, it may just be me but keeping a decent stack of bills is like a little pat on the back for the hard work. Its a reminder that hard work pays off, which I can see when I buy a coffee, or some bread or something.
Reasons why I don't like cash: family members tend to treat my wallet like an ATM.
Lastly, if you want to make some people feel good (e.g. servers, bartenders, etc) tip them with $2 bills
It’s crazy that Canada, being so similar to the US, got rid of the 1 and 2 like 30 years ago.
I've heard this statistic a lot, but I haven't seen any recent evidence it is true. I used to work for a bank, and our Credit Card holders would (mostly) pay off their balance every month.
We called them Transactors vs Revolvers. 85% of our CC were Transactors, and some of them would pay down multiple times a month
From NerdWallet [^0]:
> A NerdWallet survey conducted by The Harris Poll in conjunction with our annual study in 2023 found that 43% of American adults who use credit cards (and 38% of all American adults) said they have revolving debt. The CFPB, meanwhile, found that at the end of 2022, payments on 48% of general purpose credit card accounts were for less than the full balance, meaning some debt was being revolved
Additionally,
> In 2022, credit card issuers “charged off” $37 billion in balances, meaning they determined that those balances weren’t going to be paid.
Total credit card debt in 2024 was ~$626.8 billion with a peak of $42 billion in 2019.
That was from my own cursory research. Here's how GPT-5 did when I asked it about this topic: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b9b95f-0b14-8012-be34-48cb3bd10d.... Taking a cursory look at the sources provided shows that its analysis is mostly correct.
[^0]: https://archive.ph/0AzYa
Wozniak famously went further and would order sheets of them uncut (costs more), then pay a shop to perforate them for him so he could peel them off for people (making it look really fake).
He had a funny story about doing this at a casino for a slot machine and getting interrogated by the secret service iirc where he handed the guy a fake ID where he had an eye patch and it said he was a laser operator or something. He played dumb about the bills to look more suspicious instead of explaining the truth.
Hard to tell if it was just a tall tale, but given that it was Woz it was probably mostly real.
Splitting a tab is a simple matter of asking for separate checks and at the bar, separate tabs.
This may be generational, but I’m exactly the other way. Cash in my mind is “spent” when it leaves my bank account. Using it afterwards is less like spending money than, say, casino chips.
When I want to be unrestrained in spending, when say on vacation or treating a friend, I’ll take out cash and then spend a mix of cash and card. The card transactions feel real; the cash lets us splurge.
The real reason is that they want you to use cards, not cash and as far as I can tell, it's working. However, I find this kind of policy hurts people, particularly children, elderly people and disadvantaged.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/aldi-spart-rueckge...
A society depending entirely on corporations for currency function is incredibly fragile in addition to corporate payment services being rent seeking, privacy invading, transaction morality deciding monsters. At least in the USA.
Governments should definitely be regulating and requiring those offering paid goods and services to accept cash. And not just for paying debts.
The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.
http://moosebay.com is a close family friend who lives in and guides out of Ely. I had a great trip there many years ago.
I’ll have to ask them about your story, surely they remember it happening.
We found a restaurant that had gas grills. They couldn't make french fries, because their fry machine was electric. They couldn't make shakes. They were pouring soda from bottles they had bought at a grocery store. They were working by candlelight and adding up the bill on a hand calculator, but they were doing business like crazy. I think they were not doing credit cards, but it was long enough ago that they might have been taking imprints. Certainly today they would not be able to take cards, unless they had battery backup or a generator, since many cards don't have the raised digits any more.
It’d better if the government just mandated the eCash system in the back half of Applied Cryptography (which is similar to the Japanese system discussed elsewhere in this thread).
Contactless cards can also do offline transactions, without any Internet connectivity. We support that in our app via https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/co...
I'm not worried about dirty cash as compared to every purchase being tracked and all the fees for using services like Venmo or whatever exchange service du jour, and they all apply their petty moralizing. It's not the way forward if you value freedom and privacy.
For some silly reason, the machine stocks only these bills: $5$ $20$ $100$
Why waste an entire cash dispenser on fives when it could instead be handing out fifties (or at least tens)... especially at an ATM!?
I think it's time for a $1000 bill, again. Let's get rid of bills less than $10$ (coins instead); also, get rid of pennies [in progress] and nickels.
Leaving only: dimes*, quarters, halves, dollar [coin], $2 & $5 [coins], $10$ $20$ $50$ $100$ $1000$ [bills]
*I'd suggest nix'ing this one, too, if it were physically larger [but isn't]
I only stock my wallet with $100$ $50$ $10$ $2$ [bills], and immediately get rid of ones ($1$) when possible. I do not have any credit cards.
Hacker News user unaware Poor People^tm exist
But does anybody actually run to the ATM for just five dollars (as opposed to say ten)?!?
Just for reference, I am a blue-collar electrician that lives in a less-affluent rural state. I became worth zero dollars 9 years ago, which was a pleasant day I'd labored years towards.
I liked it.
I agree, but I'd actually like to see 200 and 500 dollar denominations as well. Would keep the same number of distinct bills that way if the three smallest ones were phased out.
Amazing how we skipped right over the $50 bill.
In my area, anyway, there are a bunch that do. Not only will they give you $100 bills (by default if you're withdrawing at least that much), but you can also just tell the machine how many of what denomination bills you want the cash in (excluding $1 and $5 bills) and it'll do it.
That’s not to discount its upsides but its downsides shouldn’t be handwaived away either.
I'm only near a few dozen people per day at most, and the chances of one of them trying to rob me are near zero, and the most they could get is a fraction of what they could access through a stolen card number. Meanwhile, there's constant attempts for data breaches at payment processors and those they work with, so my chances of being harmed by a data breach are much higher than by a robbery.
Also, you are paying insurance premiums for those voided transactions. Vendors are chanrged around 3% for card transactions, and they pass that on to the customer, although some only pass it to their card customers, with a surcharge for card transaction.
One of my cards is very thick and metal. I found that one had fraud on it at a much higher rate than any of the plastic cards I’ve had. It was heavy to the point that it would get comments from about 40% of the people I handed it to. I can only theorize, but my guess is that card signaled a higher value and was more likely to draw the attention of someone who may care to go on a spending spree.
While I can report the issues and get a refund and a new card, it was always a real hassle. Since I stopped carrying that card and use it exclusively online, I don’t think I’ve had a single incident in several years. I used to have it happen about once per quarter.
Visiting Europe, I really like that the transaction is done right in front of you. The pain point is that my card is chip + signature, when everything there is chip + pin. When I last visited London I would stop into the store and went to the self-scan. I had to wait for the attendant to print out a physical receipt for me to sign, which always took a while. In the US we can sign on the electronic pad. It’s all a formality anyway, since no one checks and everyone just scribbles whatever.
Signing the recipe is a useless security theatre. That's why it's not done in Europe.
Now that I think about, I wonder if this signature business is a result of our restaurant norms. Since the waiter takes the card, runs it, and then brings back a bill to sign. If they switch to a PIN, every restaurant would be forced to upgrade to handheld devices, or have the customer pay up front on the way out. A worthwhile change imo, but I can see lobbyists fighting to avoid it.
I remember as a teen reading some stories about how cashiers wouldn't accept cards that didn't have a signature on the back and made people sign it right there in the store, apparently not at all understanding the purpose of it.
Now that we sign electronic pads, it’s even worse. There is no record of the signature on the back of the card to compare to, no one looks at it, and most of the pads are sensitive enough to sign properly. It’s a really expensive rubber stamp.
Because my card has been skimmed twice. The first time we were 100% it was a major retailer who was insisting my wife needed to swipe the card for a particular discount, but the second time the only in-person use we could remember was at a service station where we inserted the card to pay and pretty much the whole card goes in the slot.
You can read the magstripe from as little as about 1/3rd of the strip...though it's also possible someone is just embedding a scanner element to optically grab numbers nowadays, the tech is certainly cheap enough.
The trouble is it's really hard to reliably demagnetize a credit card, and the magstripe-less card rollout is being done incredibly slowly.
Newer cards don't have embossed numbers on the front anymore, only on the back, and these days I put electrical tape over them just in case someone is watching cameras. But I can't delete the magstripe and be sure it's gone reliably.
Credit card processors charge large fees on transactions, which is a huge tax on just about... everything.
You can make a lot of that tax back via rewards. And not every card user has a good rewards-paying card - it's usually the more rich that do - so rewards function as a wealth transfer from the less rich to the more rich.
Very few stores have lower prices for cash, and processors try to ban that via their contracts when they can. If you pay with cash you pay the higher price to cover the credit card fees anyway, so you're just subsidizing the rewards earners. Might as well recoup some of that yourself.
In my observation being that much incentivized by the reward system seems to be a very US-American thing. In Germany, I have never heard anybody seriously talking about that they love the reward system of their credit card. I would claim that at most some (but I think rather few) people in Germany consider some very specific reward that their credit card has as a slight convenience - but nothing more.
Money isn't sent to the USA. It is sent to the banks that own your particular credit card. Many of these are certainly in the USA, but your statement makes it sound somehow patriotic/anti-USA to avoid using credit cards.
> Interchange: the fee we pay to the card issuer, i.e. your customers’ banks > Scheme fee: the fees we pay to the schemes, i.e. Visa or Mastercard
> Visa Consumer Debit > Interchange fees 0.1% to 0.2% or 0.02€ > Scheme fees 0.0082€ + 0.11% to 0.312%
Obviously all the large payment card schemes have investors and subsidiary legal entities all around the world, and not all of the card schemes are from the USA. However I think it's fairly clear that at least 1/1000th of total card transactions everywhere in the world ends up flowing into the USA eventually, and that's without accounting for licensing and accreditation fees for the technology underpinning the system, also mainly from the USA.
I'm not surprised that European politicians would like to get hold of that money for domestic purposes by promoting Wero, and no doubt if political/propaganda gains can be made by presenting this as patriotic, at least some will try.
[1]: https://www.barclaycard.co.uk/content/dam/barclaycard/docume...
The consumer essentially can’t be accused of not exercising due caution unless you have ignored at least one bill with fraudulent charges. This is real value, so once you’ve bought into the system, getting the rewards is a major incentive to choose one card over another.
Rewards are nice, but not the primary reason I use a credit card.
In fact, PayPal binds you to their in-house mediation of fraud claims. I was required to ship $60 worth of merchandise back to the fraudster in China to receive a refund, but the cheapest shipping available to me was $50.
Paying businesses you can use EFTPOS which I believe is run by the central bank and has very low fees on debit cards, or the usual credit card networks/Apple Pay/gpay.
I do tend to shop at low-margin places like WinCo Foods. There's also an auction house I buy big ticket items from. Both charge credit card fees. I've never seen a gas station anywhere in the US not charge extra for credit cards, and most also charge extra for debit cards. The DMV also charges a fee. I don't know if Grocery Outlet charges a fee, but I do shop there too.
Also, pretty much every recurring charge I have, e.g. from T-Mobile, Comcast, and my water supplier and mortgage processor all charge credit card fees, if I use a card instead of ACH transfers.
There is a local supermarket chain that doesn't accept credit cards at all because they'd have to raise their cash price.
Everyone pays for credit card fees. Not just the people using CCs. Then CC companies pocket those crazy high fees while giving a lil bit back as "rewards".
This is a good example of a system we've normalized in this country which harms most people.
Anyone who gives a 3% discount for cash will get cash from me, but I already have all my money in index funds. The effort to maximize points is “use this credit card, get the cash back”.
It’s really not that much effort, for rich people with excellent credit. It is of course a hugely regressive system, but that wasn’t the argument you made.
Still wouldn’t recommend them for anyone who’s not particularly good with money, but 2% back for almost no effort is a pretty good trade-off. Keeping track of rotating quarterly bonuses? Yeah—-then it’s worth thinking about ROI of your time.
I also have a 4% card, which took a good amount of effort, and needs regular attention as the issuer has realized it wasn't a good idea and is changing the deal. Now it has a limit and then falls back to 2%. Probably still worth the effort.
Miles/points seems like a lot of work though. I could see a study showing that's not worth the effort for most people... but I think the thing there is to find a card with points that are valuable for you and then maximize that, so there's not a one size fits all there.
Some years ago I looked what my bank offered and there were a lot of exceptions, it was very far from "everything". I think the math came out to saving like $100 total a year, not really worth it.
I’m generally a pretty responsible credit user. I pay the whole bill each month and never paid a dime in interest. But I’d be lying if I said I never justified a slightly larger purchase that I would have otherwise made by calculating the “discount” from the points. Doing this just one time on a modestly large purchase can effectively negate all the points you might earn in a given year.
I found even moving to a debit card helped in two ways. One, the point game goes away. But I think more importantly, when spending on a debit card you see the balance go down, so there is an instant and clear impact of the expense. With a credit card the number goes up, and you have to invert it and do the math in your head to feel the expense in the moment, which most people don’t do. And when people look at their bank balance at it hasn’t moved, they think they still have that money to spend. It’s subtle, you might not realize it, but those are the games they play. I’ve probably saved more money from simply spending less, than I would make in points.
I do keep one credit card around that I use for my recurring online payments. These are set it and forget it, so the psychology plays less of a role, as far as I can tell. And I review all the stuff on that recurring list on a regular basis to keep it lean. I have to spend $5k to make $100 in points. Who cares? It’s a lot easier to trim $200 or even $500 out of $5k in terms of spending, if I’m really looking to maximize my savings. Not to mention, the points aren’t cash in your pocket, they are an excuse to spend even more.
Let’s say I have points to get a free flight. Great, now I’m also spending money out of pocket on a hotel, meals, entertainment, etc. That “free” $600 plane ticket actually costs $5k in other expenses, but it’s ok, because we’re earning $100 more in points for spending that $5k.
It’s a trap. It’s subtle, it might feel like a win, but they’re coming at you from several different angles. It’s not just about the people paying interest on their balance. They make about as much on the interchange fees from high volume users as they do from those interest payments. Those points are also a trick to get you to swipe more to boost their interchange fee profits.
I just flew to London for free and our hotel was free (the Westminster) on points. Earlier in the year we stayed in a $900 a night hotel free on points in Quepos Costa Rica. We flew there on a Delta companion pass by having a $350 AF Delta credit card that also has a $200 Hotel credit (Delta Business Platinum).
I almost always fly to see my parents free on points (AirFrance 20K points to book Delta flights round trip). Of course I don’t pay for anything when I go home.
But if you are getting most of your points via spending instead of sign up bonuses, you’re doing it wrong (See r/churning). That is unless you do a lot of business travel.
Either way, we travel a lot anyway. Credit card points increase our travel budget.
As far as sign up bonuses go, I have very little interest in credit cards into a hobby.
It’s fine if you aren’t interested in “the hobby”. But if I have a choice between spending $40k - $60K for 60,000 points and spending $5000 in 3 months to get 60K points, I’m going to choose the latter.
Credit cards are a snare for the chronically indebted, to shake pennies from their pockets to transfer to the wealthy.
However, if you have no debt (which is enough to be considered "wealthy", IMO), you'd be a fool not to use a credit card for most transactions. Because the rewards they hand out are built into the prices paid for everything by people who pay with cash.
In my own case... I got my first credit card at 18, and by the time I was 22 I had racked up $20k in debt. I took drastic action and stopped using cards completely, and lived only on my income from multiple jobs, going without anything I wanted to buy for several years. Beans, rice, pasta, one pair of shoes, three shirts. Until I paid it off. By the time I was 24 I had paid it off waiting tables, driving taxi. Then I cancelled my cards. And so for reasons unrelated to privacy, I had no credit cards for 15 years after that, and only used cash or debit cards.
It was only in my mid thirties that I was put wise to the fact that I was losing 1% to 3% of my average spend by not having a card. So I got the most expensive card I could with the best payback ratio, and have never carried a balance on it at the end of a month. Over the ten years I've had it, it's paid me back somewhere around $30k, all siphoned from the pockets of people who don't pay their debt off.
Is this a vile and rapacious system? Absolutely. Would I be stupid not to take advantage of it after doing my time and learning the hard way? Yeah.
I still pay cash a lot, because I don't need a record of what I'm up to. And I'd support a ban on credit cards which would lead to merchants dropping prices for everyone. But here we are.
Not to any meaningful degree, because you and I are outliers by paying our credit balance each month - or else they'd compensate for it with fees.
I pay off monthly, so I win.
I travel and dine out a lot. All my personal and business expenses go on that one card. I also use it to pay for all the servers and infrastructure for my clients, which they reimburse me for. If I'm out to dinner with friends, I try to use my card and have them send me cash. All this adds up to several thousand dollars a year.
I’m not saying that everyone should switch to cash for everything all the time. But the more that privileged people switch to digital payments and eschew cash, the more difficult it becomes for those who rely on or want to use cash to do so.
Choosing privacy could mean a little more (or a lot more, depending on one’s views) inconvenience. Hopefully there are still enough people who use cash and keep cash payments alive for longer (which helps many other people who may not be as privileged or as educated as a different crowd).
Quite the opposite: when using some electronic payment method, I better make careful notes of each transaction so that I can detect whether some fraud happened (which happens for basically every method of digital payment). On the other hand, for cash this is much less necessary.
There is no bank on earth that will service a cash heavy (only) business for free. The cost/risk/fees of moving the physical cash around can be worse than what Visa charges.
You could go one step further and think about it from the bank perspective. The cost of physically transacting cash when you could send a packet across the ether to accomplish the same is a wild increase in energy expenditure, etc. Someone had to physically drive to the bank to move the cash. There's no other option. Possibly in a gigantic armored vehicle. Often times multiple times per week. Handling all of this activity is very expensive for all parties involved.
The bank has counting machines and a safe built in the last century as well.
Not having to carry your wallet around and make trips to ATMs is rather convenient, but in aggregate, I'll still NOT recommend this. I realize I have ended up spending several times I would have had I stuck to cash. There seems to be a psychological aspect that makes you keep track subconsciously of how much you are spending when you have to physically draw cash. With mobile payments? It's just scan a code and forget about it. I am planning to stop by the end of this year.
Stores aren't allowed to use credit cards to track purchases or to link customers to loyalty programs. That's why you need to use a separate loyalty card, or a store-branded credit card.
Walmart, for example, will by default add in-store purchases using a credit card (and no other identifying information) to the purchase history on a Walmart.com account set up with the same credit card.
You can only disable this tracking by going into Account > Settings > Privacy > Data Sharing in your Walmart.com account, where you'll find an option that states "Allow us to automatically add store purchases to your purchase history using credit card."
They are not allowed to track you when you don't _have_ an account. With Apple Pay or Android Pay they won't even be able to do that because they get anonymous tokens and not the card number.
> We collect your personal information from technology we use in and outside of our stores. For example, our point-of-sale terminals process your credit card information when you complete your purchase [...]
Which is pretty obvious. Nothing about them explicitly tracking in-store purchase history via credit card numbers, which as above, they certainly do and allow you to disable in your account settings.
As another example, southern grocer H-E-B is famous for not having loyalty cards and tracking in-store customer behaviors via credit card number, regardless of whether you have an HEB.com account. They then sell that data to vendors. [0]
This NYT article from several years ago verifies that Target ties all credit card purchases to a unique "guest ID". [1]
Can you cite the US federal regulation or Visa/Mastercard TOS that prohibits tracking customer purchase behavior by credit card number without consent? There may be state or local statutes I'm unaware of, but I'm confident there's nothing on a country-wide level.
You are absolutely correct that Apple Pay and Android Pay do not allow tracking in this manner due to anonymous tokenizing. But that's nothing new - going back to the subject of the article, tracking generally isn't possible with cash transactions as well.
[0] https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-custo...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
Neither applies to in-person transactions. You don't sign anything when you enter Walmart.
The rules are specified in PCI-DSS and also there are explicit laws in many states. There is wording that the card details or derived information can only be stored for legitimate business or legal reasons (i.e. associated with the transaction itself).
> If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID
You need to have a ToS acceptance somewhere along the chain. They can't use credit cards without notifying you.
While it breaks the law, I kind of feel sympathetic to it, given how much the law tends to advantage big companies.
Not true!
For a while I was manufacturing cash and did some research on the hygiene component.
Surprisingly, I learned tap to pay was the most hygienic iff one didn’t use a common terminal for tips or signing.
Coins were the second most hygienic with a germ score of 168RLU . Cash third. Credit fourth, and dead last was shared payment terminals one physically touched (this includes tap to pay if one “answers a couple of questions.”) A separate study found smart watches were dirtier than terminals.
[1] https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is...
[2] https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/
[3] https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-glo...
And amusingly [4] https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-a...
Reports in this space are full of confirmation bias so take the RLU scores with a grain of salt. Likewise some cultures have cleaner methods of dealing with cash than others.
The Culture has a proverb, "money is a sign of poverty".
1. Put all of your purchases on the travel rewards card
2. Pay it off in full every month, no exceptions
For people running a little mom-and-pop business, delivery costs could add up, but they are likely to be in a more-time-than-money situation, and make bank runs on the way to or from the business.
There's also a lot less liability, because counterfeit money is easy to detect, and there aren't any fees or losses from stolen cards or chargebacks.
Having been the manager at a place that handled a lot of cash, I spent several hours every shift counting all those tills. The clerks might only need a few minutes for their part, but then the till goes to a backroom where the manager counts it again. Then all that cash is combined into piles and counted again.
Bill counting machines start at less than $100, and they make it super quick, so accuracy and handling time isn't really a problem any more.
Most retail theft is of inventory, not cash, and chargebacks will easily surpass lost cash anyway.
Although you can find cards that give you 1.5-2% back that you can use on travel or anything, as you please.
It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives.
Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.
Nothing "child-like" in trying to make your life better, even in small ways.
I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead.
It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.
If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.
If it's possible to do the equivalent of cash, but with some sort of smartcards that exchange some sort of offline zero-knowlege proofs, then that would be preferable over physical cash, because it could eliminate the need for change or marked bills and it would be even more private.
I did this back in 2014 or so when I was, ironically, more strapped for cash and needed to debug my budget (thanks, student loans!). i stopped because carrying change is annoying as fuck, losing cash is annoying at best and painful at worst, and tracking cash purchases is actually much harder than purchases made on the card.
instead, i used my debit card for purchases (couldn't spend beyond my means with it) until my income situation improved. i use one credit card exclusively now (and pay it down at the end of the month).
this was before businesses started going card-only post COVID. that's another reason why i wouldn't do this today.
(I built a Go-based expense tracker years ago that turns all bank alerts and receipts into, then, transactions in Expensify and, now, rows in Google Sheets. I'm able to track literally every single card transaction I make as well as reconcile purchases with their receipts. this is impossible with cash.)
Many reports have been written about the mechanisms via which the monetary system steals wealth from the working class. I'm tired of linking to them. The conditioning is too strong. Frankly the more this goes on, the more sympathy I feel for the owner class for their contempt for the sheeple. I'm starting to think they are right. People are dumb and evil and should be milked for all they've got.
I mostly feel bad for those of us who can see what's going on and are treated the same as the sheeple.
Gets some of the advantages - not all.
Or if you shop regularly at a given store, reloadable gift cards are a decent substitute.
But cash isn’t terribly scary.
124. Not Paying with Cash (rubenerd.com)
20 points by mikece 1 hour ago | flag | hide | 40 commentsWhile the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.
And now we rarely have the "it wont connect lets try again it takes 2 minutes" dance of 10 years ago.