Anyone with a credit card
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.
A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)
The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.
The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.
So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.
But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.
The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.
If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.
And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.
And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.
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Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.
When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.
I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.
There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.
(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)
Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.
What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.
Only for merchants who have never done real accounting. They lose a lot more than merchant fees to cash. The clerk has to count and recount the money. Then the manager counts and recounts the till at the end of the shift. Then the manager counts all the money in the safe to prepare the daily deposit, and then they have to get that to the bank (at least the bank doesn't charge them after that, but the bank has costs handling their cash as well). This time is not free. That is before we get into the costs of theft, counterfeits - and all the equipment to keep cash safe.
Unless someone has actually added those costs up I'm going to remain convinced credit cards fees are cheaper than cash.
The rewards are also free to me in the sense that the merchant pays them. If the merchant has priced them in, then the rewards aren’t free, but using cash is throwing away something I’m still paying for.