101–110 of 508 posts
I live in DC and support this law not just from an accessibility standpoint but also from a privacy standpoint. I am tired of every retail/restaurant establishment building a profile of me.
...then don't buy things from those businesses? We need a stronger reason than "I want that" to force businesses to give us things — otherwise how do we decide whose preferences we should mandate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...then don't buy things from those businesses? We need a stronger reason than "I want that" to force businesses to give us things — otherwise how do we decide whose preferences we should mandate?
Ideally you decide by voting. It’s either that or you decide things by who has the most money / power / guns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...then don't buy things from those businesses? We need a stronger reason than "I want that" to force businesses to give us things — otherwise how do we decide whose preferences we should mandate?
Ideally you decide by voting. It’s either that or you decide things by who has the most money / power / guns.
Not sure whether Sweetgreen choosing to go cashless is an example of "decide things by who has the most money / power / guns."?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming that's correct, that effectively boils down to the same thing? Prices would be somewhat lower if merchants didn't need to consider the ~3% disappearing in the payment processor.
That doesn’t necessarily follow though. Consumers are more likely to go to a store that takes credit cards and spend more once they are there than a store that accepts only cash. If the merchant has to pay 3% in credit card fees for a 20% increase in revenue, that’s likely a good deal for the merchant.
Debit cards exist and partially solve the inconvenience of holding cash. But, they're really inconvenient in other ways. As a consumer I'll prefer credit cards most of the time just for the security benefits. If there's a breach at a merchant and my number is stolen I don't have to worry about my checking account being screwed up for however long it takes to sort things out.
It'd be nice if we had another option for cashless payments. Particularly, one that doesn't impose such a large financial burden on everyone. Yeah, rewards are nice but they're disproportionately allocated as well. I think it's fairly evident going forward cash will be handled less and less. Credit card companies are the incumbents and path to least resistance to accepting cashless payments, but they don't need to be the only option.
With real competition I suspect we'll see those swipe fees suddenly decrease. Unfortunately, some of the bigger attempts at non-credit card payments (e.g., PayPal) charge commensurate fees. So, maybe I'm off and 3% is the minimum needed by the middlemen to stay afloat.
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FedNow is a payment system by the government providing the rails, but we'll have to see how it evolves. Zelle's implementation/rollout, which is a similar product, but owned/operated by the banks/corporations, has been messy. Venmo, and CashApp, however, are fairly popular.
Isn't FedNow more like the NPP in Australia that enables things like Osko and PayID? It's not quite the same as a postal savings system because the customer still holds their primary transaction account with a private bank. If, instead, customers have their primary transaction account with a government run service (the reason it's called a postal savings system is because historically this was the post office) it wou…
I live in DC and support this law not just from an accessibility standpoint but also from a privacy standpoint. I am tired of every retail/restaurant establishment building a profile of me.
...then don't buy things from those businesses? We need a stronger reason than "I want that" to force businesses to give us things — otherwise how do we decide whose preferences we should mandate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer to that is to help your citizens so they don't need to rob a Shake Shack, not to exclude even more people from enjoying Shake Shack while going surveillance mode on everyone's calorie intake
Shake Shack does not have the capacity to help a society. They do the only thing they can to in their power - remove the incentive for stealing. It is up to the gov't to enact policies (carrot or stick) to prevent robberies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without State intervention there's nothing stopping businesses colluding to all go cashless. Or... all together do something else that's bad for us. Or monopolizing. The strong enough reason is "it's better for the people." It's easy how we decide whose preferences we mandate - we mandate people's preferences, and businesses find ways to make money within those constraints. There's no issue making profit like this, s…
Right, no one is rejecting the notion of regulation. But personal preferences are a bad way to choose regulation — businesses can aggregate preferences much better than the state can.
One easy way to keep the homeless from coming in to make purchases is to refuse cash payments.
The government's job isn't to cater to business preferences it is to look out for the well-being of the people.
I live in DC and support this law not just from an accessibility standpoint but also from a privacy standpoint. I am tired of every retail/restaurant establishment building a profile of me.
...then don't buy things from those businesses? We need a stronger reason than "I want that" to force businesses to give us things — otherwise how do we decide whose preferences we should mandate?