I'm Swedish and if someone insists on doing a transaction using cash when Swish or card is available, I'd immediately start to wonder if it's for some kind of more or less shady reason, probably tax evasion at the very least.
This is what people think of when someone "uses cash". Not hauling tens of thousands to buy a used car or to settle the bill for having your bathroom tiled, which would be cases I too would raise an eyebrow over.
If a merchant tries to promote cash options I immediately think they’re doing it for tax evasion reasons - not because of the touted reason that “card payments cost more to process” (they don’t once you factor in the cost of handling cash).
With credit cards you pay a fee, but you don't have to deal with all of those other things that people often don't consider.
Apart from a transit card (all the mass transit also takes cash ... no fee added), I'm not going to pay to feed the surveillance machine.
Where I live in Seattle, a lot of businesses simply don't handle cash at all, because break-ins for the cash register are quite expensive to deal with, and they circumvent that problem by simply posting outside the business that there is no cash.
One of the few businesses near me that must take cash, a dispensary, recently had an issue where somebody tried to break in using a stolen pickup truck to crash into the building. They didn't get the cash because they didn't get past the interior bollard system, but they did cause enough structural damage that the roof partially collapsed into the street.
But i've paid with cash all over europe, and except for some vending machines, i've never been turned down, be it london, paris, berlin, belgrade or athens... from large supermarkets and museums, to local corner newsstands with a small fridge and cold drinks and local fast food joints. On the other hand, the most unsafe I ever felt as a traveller was in chicago, supposedly in a "nicer/safe area", and I've been through the balkans in the 1990s.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...
I’m definitely looked as crazy in my friend group from time to time, but over the years I’ve just become known as the guy who will always have cash on him if necessary so I guess the walking ATM bit helped with acceptance of it?
I figure that if folks don’t take a stand and use cash even if they don’t need to now, we will lose the ability to later. I don’t want to live in a world where all my purchases are mineable, because that eventually turns into monitored and then authorized.
The inconvenience is a small price to pay for freedom from surveillance.
It has amused me though over the years how bad cash handling skills have become. When I was a cashier as a teenager 25+ years ago, myself and all my fellow coworkers could break change at relative light speed and often just from mental math/memory. Now it’s amusing watching a young cashier give change back on a $48.31 order after handing them a $100 bill. Sometimes takes longer than the proverbial grandma writing a check back in my day.
I believe it was part of an agreement with the card companies over anti-competitive behavior.
What's your opinion on that? In NA, for small businesses it's common to offer to pay in cash to avoid paying sales tax.
It's also not common (and illegal).. this account posts a lot of vague platitudes.
This is almost always in a portion of the invoice written up at around half the agreed amount, and the rest in cash. Or for smaller jobs just on the side with no paperwork involved outside of a firm handshake.
This is the norm for the lower end of the trades. If you’re dealing with a single owner company with a few employees I’d be very surprised if they would not be willing.
Yeah, once you get into “real companies” that are charging upper middle class rates on million dollar properties it changes.
I haven’t had trades work done in Mexico, but considering all my visits were effectively cash only transactions I’d be pretty surprised if it wasn’t at least as common as in the US.
I don't know about Australia, but in New Zealand many small retailers and restaurants add a card payment surcharge (typically 1.5%-2.5%) automatically when you pay by card. So you are somewhat penalised for the convenience of using a card. This never happens in Europe.
Visa and Mastercard have successfully lobbied and conspired with local banks in both countries to bury EFTPOS, which were national debit card payment systems with a flat transaction fee ranging between 10 and 50 cents per transaction (depending on the bank).
A while back, Visa/MC realised that debit card transactions, being on the rise, were a highly lucrative market to tap into that they had been missing out on, so they set out on a war of attrition and conspired with the local big banks to phase out EFTPOS cards in favour of Visa/MC debit cards, where the cost of transaction was to be passed on to the card user. Tiered debit cards quickly followed (Platinum, etc.), that attracted higher fee percentages for Visa/MC – payment network commission fees are published on the respective payment network websites. Other than consumers, all parties involved (big banks, payment networks) became moist with excitement at getting a huge slice of the card transactions pie.
But there is the light at the end of the tunnel (other than the light of the oncoming train) – the RBA has moved to ban all card surcharges from July 2026.
In the EU you can not charge a card fee on consumer transactions, so the merchant has the eat the cost.
If your revenue is - 2-3000 Eur a month, payment fees (and terminal subscription fees) can have a big impact.
If I were charging £3k/month, I'd be just above the threshold where paying £19.99/month to get a transaction fee of 0.99% saves money overall.
Additionally, and specifically in Sweden, the fees that banks charge businesses for handling cash (picking it up and depositing it at the end of each business day) have increased significantly in the last decade or two. This has been a significant factor in driving businesses away from cash - it's just expensive for them to deal with.
The US has a much less secure system specifically because there was much less credit card fraud in the US than in Europe.
Chip and PIN was an attempt to combat the rampant fraud in Europe.
It may be true at this point, I haven’t been tracking recently, but it wasn’t in the past.
So if you are a law abiding citizen you can easily be pissed off that you get to pay taxes and they don't.
For a few years "we don't take card" was widely interpreted as a strong indicator the merchant would evade taxes, and "I won't go there anymore" was a common reaction from some people. These days it's technically illegal and yet you will still find _some_ shops that only want cash.
That seems totally fair if they can’t pass that cost on to you for using a card. Why should they have to pay to accept your patronage?
And you didn’t answer why you shouldn’t pay that fee.
Managing cash has costs too, they're just harder to quantify: you have to ferry it to a bank, you have increased risk of theft, fraud, and robberies, you need extra time to actually check the register etc.
And then you risk losing business if you don't offer card payments because it's just more convenient for most customers (you may like wise lose some if you don't take cash, but that's a vanishing market).
That's what makes interchange and network fees so much more problematic than acquiring fees. There's very healthy competition between credit card acquirers and payment service providers on both features and price, but in the end, you have to accept whatever card your customer has or there won't be a transaction.
And you're mistaken if you think cash is cheaper for most stores. You risk theft (so need to pay for measures against that), you have straight losses from mistakes, have to spend time handling and counting cash, spend time depositing, spend time buying change, etc etc
Regarding cash, does your bank not charge a fee for depositing cash?
At this point the cost of handling cash is way higher than handling cards and as no one in Sweden ever uses cash its no longer relevant at all anyway. Now many (maybe even most?) dont accept cash to avoid the cost of handling cash instead.
(The fact that credit card networks continue doing business in Europe proves they're still profitable and the US is getting ripped off by these fees)
Paying for a used car in cash would actually be difficult because handling an amount greater than the equivalent of around USD $1k immediately starts tripping KYC/AML flags at any bank if you try to deposit it, and it's hard to use in day to day life because few places other than grocery stores even accept cash anymore.
Honestly, that system sounds a bit Orwellian. But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?
It's also worth noting that credit card interchange fees are price controlled in Europe; there's a EU directive that caps the interchange fees at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Because of this, cashback on credit cards is pitiful in the EU; you can get 0.5% cashback but not much more than that.
No, not at all. The Swish rails are free to users. But I've never had to pay any transfer fees for domestic transfers anyway. They are just much slower than using Swish (instant transfers) and much more clunky (bank account number etc. vs. phone number/QR-code).
It didn't have proper two-factor authentication when you just had to tap a button on the smartphone to approve a log-in or a bank transfer (and users didn't always tell which was which). Now it requires reading a QR code — which it should have done all the time.
AFAIK it still does not use any secure key storage on the smartphone, so if your phone gets rooted by an attacker, the attacker could gain access to your bank accounts. So far, frauds have been much easier to pull off, so criminals have not bothered to hack it. (that we know of)
1. BankID always allowed to have different settings for login and for signature. I have done that since forever. For example, I configured login to allow biometrics but not signature. If it's forcing me to enter the security code I know it is a signature, which forces me to pause. I cannot sign anything by mistake (like a transfer) because I'm forced to enter my long security code to complete it. And for the much more frequent scenario of pure logins, I can just use my finger.
2. I believe it does use the hardware-backed keychain if the device has one. I cannot prove it as the source code is not available, but I remember being curious and checking this on a rooted device.