121–130 of 508 posts
In India, even rural farmers have easy cashless mobile payments. In D.C., the capital of the US, nobody has easy cashless mobile payments, and even card payments are too difficult, with the government finally giving up and enshrining cash.
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> I don't love that I also have a 3% tax going to VISA/Mastercard/Amex/... You don’t. The merchant you are buying from is choosing to pay 3% for credit card payments because they believe incentivizing people to pay with credit cards will result in them earning more (via higher prices or higher margin goods) than incentivizing them to pay with debit/cash. If a merchant wanted to, it would be trivial for them to give y…
> If a merchant wanted to, it would be trivial for them to give you a 3% discount for paying with debit. I don't believe that a merchant is allowed to do this? Probably very dependent on your deal with credit card processors but my understanding is that the default contract between a merchant and a credit card processor stipulates that you are not allowed to offer discounts to not use credit cards differently. Of cou…
I think this was in the past or no longer enforced. I lost count now of the stores that will charge you a 2-3% fee for paying with a card.
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Right — we could decide whether each transaction should take place by voting on it. But that would be really inefficient! So instead, we generally let people trade with each other as long as it doesn't intrude on others. Not sure whether Sweetgreen choosing to go cashless is an example of "decide things by who has the most money / power / guns."?
It is an example of who has the most power. If you don't have a different service that does the same for you, you'll have to suck it up or live without the service. This becomes a big issue as soon as all services in a specific niche do 'the thing', be it refusing cash or stuff like removing headphone jacks. At that point, what are you gonna do? Stop using products from that niche altogether?
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.
But like serious question, are you tired enough that you'll actually stop using payment cards? Is it worth the inconvenience and losing 2%ish off the top of everything you buy?
Interesting. I get why you'd want to ban cashless business, but many business in a nearby town with a high crime rate are going cashless because you can't rob a Square reader quite as easily as a cash register.
Tell that to the guy who charged $4k of jewelry on my credit card. I've never been robbed of a penny of cash and now I'm having to sue my bank to get that money back.
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?
In India, even rural farmers have easy cashless mobile payments. In D.C., the capital of the US, nobody has easy cashless mobile payments, and even card payments are too difficult, with the government finally giving up and enshrining cash.
I don't think that is accurate. India and China use cheap QR code transactions, but a lot of the overhead is taken in by VC money. So I think these companies are hoping to make money on these someday, just not right now. The USA has a pretty well developed system, and debit and credit cards have been pretty ubiquitous for a few decades now. The issue is that our system is expensive, and no one is subsidizing it for f…
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In that position, the government would inevitably try to meddle. Look up Operation Choke Point back in the Obama years, when the government pressured banks to cut off a variety of "undesirable" businesses, such as payday lenders, gun dealers, and so on. Cash serves an important purpose. It is a safety valve in case of such extrajudicial overreach. Yeah, because it's private, it also enables some bad stuff (tax dodgin…
Nearly every democracy on the world manages to put on their constitution that the government won't meddle with private business without due process. And almost all of those manage to follow that rule. I'm pretty sure the US can do the same if the system is run by the government. That kind of thing only happens there because it's run by private companies.
Interesting. I get why you'd want to ban cashless business, but many business in a nearby town with a high crime rate are going cashless because you can't rob a Square reader quite as easily as a cash register.
I know a business that went cash-only for the same reason in reverse: the thieves were doing it via chargebacks saying they never heard of the place. Couldn't win disputes even with video evidence. They put in an ATM, can't charge that back.