Hacker News Reader

Comment by skopje | Hacker News Reader

...yeah but it is a pain in the ass. i end up with a percentage of unspent money every week that i have to coalesce into new bills of useful denominations. that leftover screws up my accounting system and takes extra work to put to use. i'd rather have every transaction i make tracked by visa to make my accounting cleaner and not need to futz with the whole process. the downsides you list i've never really encountered since 1992, you need better evidence of failures (unless you live in some underdeveloped nation?).

View on HN

I was working in a grocery store (after the turn of the millenium) when the CC processing went down. We could accept debit or cash, but no Mastercard, Visa, or AmEx. I didn't get (or don't recall) the backstory, but I wouldn't call Canada an under-developed nation.

Cash makes my budgeting easier too. I find it harder to overspend cash I don't have on my person. The cost is more tangible (as every debit/credit tap "feels" like the same amount). Consumers have been shown to spend more when using electronic payment methods too. As to the coins, those get tossed in a jar to be rolled later, then eventually taken to the bank and to a rainy day fund.

Cash is fuckin' excellent.

Hmm. When I worked in retail (probably like 2008 or so) when the network went down we could still take credit cards, we young folks just needed a couple minutes tutorial from the more experienced cashiers on how to do the imprint machine.

Most of my new cards do not have raised numbers, the card number is just printed on.

There aren't enough network outages for this problem to matter to me.

"What if the network's down?" is a problem solved by buying things another time on the rare occasions it happens.

Which I would posit is slightly better planning then having cash on hand, since it means you've kept a reasonable stock of whatever basic necessities absolutely can't wait.

This was well after chip'n'pin, suggesting the value from the additional sales would have been offset by any fraudulent transactions the store could (possibly) be held to.

It was very rare for us, only happened once as far as I remember. The network would need to be down, while the power was still up.

I don’t think the extra fraud was a major concern. The person would need to happen to be in the shop with their fake card for this very rare event.

Canada is def under developed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com