441–450 of 628 posts
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That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!" Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.
Plus a wired landline phone is always charged, with excellent reception.
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> Most of the cashless festivals return your unused "credits" pretty quickly after the festival. for a $5 processing fee
With a delay of their choosing, and a conversion factor for those of us that aren't locals. Cash has frictionless instant settlement, which is very hard to compete with as a centralized payment processor.
Except when they have no change (forcing you to find someone willing to change it or wait for them to do so) or refuse to accept a large bill. I often choose to use cash, but it's really not frictionless.
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> Utopia my ass It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion. The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands…
I fail to see how Sweden in this case is enforcing the cashless trends through surveillance or coercion.
Coercion: "To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel."
So if I'm down the street and cash won't let me get on a bus, the movie tickets can't be purchased, food can't be bought etc. There's the basis for pressure. Can't buy food without card, ok you go hungry. There's the threat. I'm sure that intimidation will turn up in a lot of little ways. Public ostracism / humiliation (even at subtle levels) due to not having a card could be seen as real enough to count. The network effects of not having a card will likely cause serious inconvenience.
If "you can't do anything without a card" then you are compelled to get one.
Sounds like coercion to me.
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Anglophones, please, please, excuse me for replying in my native tounge. The cashless society engages my aversion such that it is hard to say in my second language. Så jävla enig alltså! Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad. Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter. Ser fram mot min årliga skridskosemester…
... huh? Or I guess this is sarcasm? This response hardly seems warranted, given it’s just a festival exclusively accepting swish. I never use swish except for sending money to friends, so I don’t think it’s widespread for businesses. Contact less credit card is easier than everything , including cash.
Very small businesses might only accept MobilePay or cash (e.g. come and see an obscure band perform in Copenhagen, the ticket, cloakroom and bar might have these choices.)
Larger places offer it as an alternative. The canteens at Copenhagen University, for example.
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You can have a very similar experience in China. So many things are now paid for by mobile wallets such as WeChat Pay that do not support foreign accounts. It's great for locals and for the government that - in an authoritarian country - gets unfettered access to all that personalized spending data. For tourists, not so much.
WeChat payments work fine with foreign cards...
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That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use…
There’s a big club in NYC that does this (Brooklyn Mirage), except they link your credit card to the bracelet and you don’t have to load credit. Makes the lines for drinks move so fast, it’s really outstanding.
I can see value for certain specialist places, like a resort where everyone is wearing swimwear. Or a fetish club.
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I suppose that would be because of EU regulations against money laundering.
Definitely not, because a few of my banks allow it without a problem.
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This has been my experience going on holiday in the Netherlands. Everything functions on cards and touch payments. I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...
There are many ways in which Japan is more civilized than Sweden is. Speaking as a Swedish native who lived in japan for years
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Atleast 99% of my payments in sweden are with a totally normal credit card, the rest with swish. I only use paper money to give to homeless people, can’t remember when I bought something with bills and coins. I think it’s great, I’m more worried about tax evasion than my government knowing what I buy. I’m more interested in my speech being free than my purchases, even though I can see the problem in non-functioning d…
Just today I went to a concert in Malmø where the bar is cash only. This is a medium sized place. You can withdraw cash by credit card at the ticket desk, to take to the bar and pay for drinks. It's annoying for people like me, occasional visitors from Denmark. I don't know why they don't have the chip and pin terminal at the bar.
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Do you have a pin or something to verify the payment? Would a stolen bracelet be useable? How do they deal with tips?
You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah. At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one. Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choo…
Is there normally hassle? In Europe, and I think this generalisation holds in the countries that commonly pay with a card, the terminal is either mounted on the bar facing the customer, or is portable and left in a similar position.
In any case, there's never a pen, receipts mostly go immediately in the bin unless someone is claiming expenses, and the card never leaves the customer's hand.
So it's little different from a contactless bracelet, except I trust Europay-MasterCard-Visa more han a POS supplier.
It helps that there are no tips. If the number on the screen looks reasonable, I don't touch the terminal at all.