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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

I mean it's not like foreigners are blocked from using cash at those stores. And if they prefer cards, it's not like the stores that used to accept them stopped accepting them.

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Funny story… I was on a trip to Europe (Poland) using my US credit card that didn’t have tap to pay or chip and pin (I believe it was swipe only) and the store literally did not have a way to accept payment and I had no cash on hand.

They were nice enough and gave the pastry for free because they tried everything to charge the card but it didn’t work. They were embarrassed about the whole thing and were just like… please leave.

I'm not sure whether this is fully correct - most card machines do have a way to accept swiping, but I think the store did not know of it (because no one uses it in Europe). Perhaps if you remember the provider, I could check it, but most machines still accept swiping, which is innocuously placed on the side of the machine.

That being said, the US is a dinosaur when it comes to payments.

Haha I appreciate your offer for checking but this was like a decade ago. I figured the teenagers working that shop had no idea! And agreed on being the dinosaur :)

Most places will not have change so you need to carry exact cash change all the time. And many are indeed stopping using cards and switching to UPI as the fees are much less, unless they are particularly foreigner friendly, like a hotel in a tier 1 city.

In fact, card acceptance has gone _up_ in my experience. Unless you're using a very small shop which just has a QR code, most businesses now use a POS which supports a lot of payment methods including cards.

I agree that a lot of businesses now actively don't manage cash as they used to earlier... it's very difficult to get low-value notes as the central bank seems to be slowly reducing the supply by not printing as per demand.

> card acceptance has gone _up_ in my experience.

Yes acceptance may have gone up, but I think thats a side effect of normalizing digital transactions popularized by UPI.

Card acceptance may be up (I can't comment one way or another) but last I was in India, a large number of POS seem to straight up block international Credit Cards.

Yep, international/amex cards aren't enabled by default by most POS providers (_due to the high fees on the merchant side_) and most small businesses don't really know or care enough to enable them.

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