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D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

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Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#411

Post by blincoln »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #380
mindondrugs wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think I have ever encountered this in my adult life honestly. A more common occasion is encountering a business that is cash only (usually small market stalls) and is infinitely more annoying as I have to go and take out a amount of money greater than the product I want to buy, leaving me with a rather annoying amount of loose change.

Agreed. Especially when there's no ATM for 5 miles. Plurality of payment methods is always more desirable and more robust. If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale. The ability to negotiate and adapt is what makes the world go round. One example; I was caught in an emergen…

> If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale.

For some businesses, the overall cost of accepting some of those methods may be higher than the expected revenue from customers who won't use another method. Buying new payment readers. Having to convert the bitcoin immediately to currency to avoid losing money due to its constant price fluctuations. Higher per-transaction fees for some types of payment. Increased susceptibility to fraud (for cheques in particular).

> The problem comes with cashiers and managers who are not business owners and are terrified to do anything unusual. They are tied to procedural rote and unable to think dynamically.

You would be too if you were barely making ends meet, the expected outcome for "a customer asked me to accept an unusual form of payment" was almost always "it was a con, the 'customer' got the merchandise/service for free", and you'd most likely be fired as a result.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#412

Post by [deleted] »

6510 wrote: post #370
gomoboo wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup I’ve seen a large grocery store keep business going during an extended power outage with hand-written ledgers and cash transactions. Customers kept coming in to shop despite the outage.

It should be a requirement. From all the national security bullshit I've seen this must be the easiest way to permanently turn a country into chaos. Also funny is losing your id card/passport and your bank card/credit card simultaneously. You then need to get a new card from your bank that requires a valid id and you need to get a new id card which costs money. And no driving! "Gladly" this process takes so much time…

[deleted]

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#413

Post by mikestew »

rtkwe wrote: post #393
Workaccount2 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restaurant I worked at years ago would bust out those old slider-carbon-copy things for credit cards during power outages.

Both my credit and debit cards are instant prints that don't have the embossing those require. Running the old carbon copier over them wouldn't show anything except maybe a vague outline of my credit card.

Apple Card doesn't even have a number printed on it (because you can request a new # ad hoc, via the app), let alone embossed. Just my name, and (without walking to get the physical card) Apple logo, and I think a Goldman-Sachs logo. If the power goes out, the card's only utility would be if you need a thin piece of titanium for your McGyvering.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#414

Post by sbuttgereit »

constantly wrote: post #364
sbuttgereit wrote: post #340

OK... naturally this is a political discussion; but I find the politics of this interesting and maybe even amusing. I don't live in DC and at don't really have a horse in this race but I sense a contradiction. I think many would consider Washington D.C. to be governed solidly by American progressives. While the rationale for this law fits solidly within their views on egalitarianism, I wonder why no one is discussing…

What about electronic negative environmental externalities? It requires a while network of internet (backbones, cables, satellites, telecoms) and constant electricity generation to feed it, creation of credit cards, etc. This all seems to have a significantly greater effect than the creation of a new physical bill that lasts 6-10 years.

This feels much more like a rationalization rather than a thought out argument. Let's pause to think about this.

- Cash and electronic payments both are accounted for in pretty much the same way; there are some differences when you zoom in enough, but in terms of energy consumption not materially different: both are accounted for using computers and the same mechanisms are used in communicating results.

- Electronic payment mechanisms use electronic terminals to collect payment, but cash (mid-20 century onward) uses electrically driven devices such as cash drawers or data entry terminals to track. We won't get into retail cash office details too much other than to say that for our purposes cash is either break-even in terms of energy consumption vs. pure electronic payment (though really cash is probably at a slight disadvantage since there other devices are often at play).

-- Transfers of capital between banks and banks, and banks and reserve banks, are typically all electronic, though cash will need additional transport steps which will consume additional energy to the mere communication of transactions which all payment types require. We still could consider this break-even.

-- Bank to retailer and retailer to bank conveyances are where I expect electronic payments to dominate in the energy efficiency contest. Retailers need to carry a minimum cash on hand for making change in transactions (we'll mostly ignore crime related externalities for this discussion). When the retailer falls below their minimum cash on hand, they need to have cash physically delivered. Retailers also, because of crime issues, need to clear the excess cash out of the store quickly as well, another physical transfer. This often means big abnormally heavy trucks prowling around city streets; in fact you might draw some inverse relationship to the energy efficiency of the transport mode to the suitability of its use in transferring cash. But remember that any physical transfer of tangible cash is also backed by an electronic transaction accounting for the transfer.

And I think that last point hits the biggest error in your reply. Cash transactions may supplant some electronic transactions, but do so with physical movements which also consume energy... and unless your prepared to say moving a kilobyte or two across town over a wire is less efficient than moving that same cash across town in a big truck my guess is you might agree that electronic payments will tend to be more energy efficient... and remember even with the physical move you probably don't save the electronic transaction anyway because of accounting needs: you just change its nature.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#415

Post by mariojv »

I agree with most commenters here that cash is useful and that cashless is a step in the wrong direction. I did want to point out, though, that this differs a lot from what at least some commenters on other forums are saying about the ban. All the top voted comments on Reddit about this are against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/washdc/comments/16wacjy/dcs_ban_on_...

I find the difference in opinion between the HN crowd and Reddit kind of interesting. Part of it is probably because that is a local to DC subreddit, but I also believe they're not really considering the privacy / civic resilience angle.

From my perspective, having lived through a near total power outage in Texas for a week in February 2021, having some cash, food, and drinking water on hand is just basic common sense these days. Some local grocers were letting people take groceries without paying, anecdotally, but I don't think that was everywhere or even corporate policy. You also don't want to rely on that to feed your family or pay for basic goods in an emergency. At one point, even the cell network was starting to go down in my area because the generators powering the cell towers were running out of fuel.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#416

Post by qup »

hackernewds wrote: post #148
qup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is not how the chargebacks systems work. Source: I've worked in Fraud department at a large payment processor

Not sure what you mean. It was Square, which is talked about above.

Customer's bank says "customer says they have no knowledge of this charge"

Square allows a dispute, including with video and photo evidence of the guy signing the tablet himself. That was submitted.

Customer's bank kept the money.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#417

Post by qup »

bagels wrote: post #130
qup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, the other thieves will rip a hole in the wall to steal the ATM.

It's been over 4 years, so the ROI is pretty healthy even if this were true.

It's a late-night business, though,and adjacent to early-open businesses, so it's probably hard to find a convenient time.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#418

Post by mariojv »

lazrgatr wrote: post #234

Argentina has effectively a cash-only economy. Queues in excess of an hour at the supermarket are fairly common partly because of the overheads in having everyone pay with cash (needing to empty the tills, validate large notes, taking time to get correct change out and/or giving change). Let's not be so quick to say that card payments are all bad.

Is this a product of it being cash-based or a product of the high inflation that Argentina sees? I imagine it would be quite chaotic with prices fluctuating so rapidly.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#419

Post by xkcd-sucks »

yftsui wrote: post #180
nonrandomstring wrote: post #162

Almost every comment is about politics, choice, privacy, rights, markets and percentages. There's a completely different take; Civic resilience From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. Therefore cash in circulation acts as a buffer that provides economic stability and continuity of operations. Also,…

Cash is a superior technology for security -> Huh? The bullet proof glass cage protecting the cashiers is the “technology”.

The problem of space of physically securing cash is more stable over time and better understood by non experts than the problem space of securing electronic payments: For example, the costs and benefits of "There is a new innovation in theft, people yank ATMs out of walls with trucks, which you can mitigate by putting up bollards" are easier to understand than "there is a buffer overflow in your logging software that is used everywhere".

So yes, a bulletproof cage is security technology, it works sufficiently well most of the time, there aren't many low-effort innovations to break it (bombs and such have been around forever but aren't used to rob convenience stores often), and if it does get broken it's obvious. Whereas a software exploits can be harder to detect and can be much easier to replicate and scale

Edit - Innovations in physical theft: That Kia/Hyundai car trend, which is really software. The trick bums use to steal blue bikes from docks. Writing threatening notes to bank tellers without any way of making good on the threat because tellers are directed to not fight back. Any more examples?

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#420

Post by zen928 »

dools wrote: post #7

Instead of banning cashless businesses because it's discriminatory to the unbanked perhaps they should focus on reducing discrimination in the banking sector and providing a publicly run electronic payment system.

Instead of pretending that you get to establish the rules for how your business receives transactions VS the defined systems, standards and legal accommodations that you're already implicitly and explicitly agreeing to when establishing your corporate entity, they should follow the established standards and look to engage in legal activism that aligns with their interests instead of blatantly violating the law.
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