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Not paying with cash

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Re: Not paying with cash

#211

Post by account42 »

rascul wrote: post #188
bluGill wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip this is false reasoning on their part. They never have thought about how much cash costs them so it looks like extra money but it really isn't. they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay, then the time to count the money in the till at the end of the shift. Each count above is 2 counts at best the average…

> they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay Many of my cash transactions are approximately as fast as or even faster than card transactions.

Plus cash always works while card transactions are sometimes not available or get declined which either means time wasted until the customer finds a working card or a lost transaction.

Re: Not paying with cash

#212

Post by account42 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #96
marssaxman wrote: post #16

I got irritated with the profusion of "no cash accepted" signs a few years back and started making a point of always carrying cash, to use whenever practical. I don't take it to an extreme, but I also don't want to live in a world where every transaction is trackable and all commerce is regulated by Visa, Mastercard, Apple, or Google.

I have similar concerns, but I think it's the payment conglomerates you have to worry about. Visa knows how much you spent, Fiserv knows what you bought.

It's not just Fiserv, there are often others involved as well. Even the merchant gets more data as they now have a fairly good way to identify you and correlate transactions.

Re: Not paying with cash

#213

Post by account42 »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #111
bruce511 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm sure it varies by area. But from a business point if view, cash is super expensive to deal with. As a side-effect of an acquisition we inherited a small number of customers that paid in cash. Turns out it's expensive to bank that cash, it's a security risk, it's a risk to the person transporting it and so on. In the general case, if most sales are already by card, the marginal gains of cash transactions are…

For sure. Taking cash is basically a marketing expense not an actual way to get paid.

Which is of course why no store was profitable before the invention of cashless payments.

Re: Not paying with cash

#214

Post by account42 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #198
limagnolia wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most if not all of those rewards are paid for by the interchange that they charge merchants, not the interest they charge customers. Of course, interest and fees are also profitable, but banks are pretty happy if you use the card and pay it off every month.

All the costs, reguardless of where they are accrued, are figured into the prices every one is paying

Unfortunately in many cases they are also figured into the prices cash customers pay.

Re: Not paying with cash

#215

Post by bluGill »

dlcarrier wrote: post #187
bluGill wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is free because dealing with cash costs the merchant even more than the 3% fees the card costs. If there is a discount for cash it is because they have not counted the costs which are not obvious

It costs a few hondred a month for a cash delivery service. Even if you're only handling a few thousand dollars a day in cash, that's still only around a 1% cost. For most stores, it's probably a fraction of that. Other than that, it's just a few minutes of time to close out the register, which is the one thing employees do reliably quickly, because they get to go home afterward. For people running a little mom-and-p…

most of the cash costs are time counting it not moving it to the bank. Those seconds add up. There is also loss to crime since you will get managers stealing from the safe, and clerks form a till - both done in ways you cannot prove. And outright robbery.

Having been the manager at a place that handled a lot of cash, I spent several hours every shift counting all those tills. The clerks might only need a few minutes for their part, but then the till goes to a backroom where the manager counts it again. Then all that cash is combined into piles and counted again.

Re: Not paying with cash

#216

Post by bluGill »

normie3000 wrote: post #146
bluGill wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip this is false reasoning on their part. They never have thought about how much cash costs them so it looks like extra money but it really isn't. they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay, then the time to count the money in the till at the end of the shift. Each count above is 2 counts at best the average…

> they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay Do they? Unless the shop's always serving customers, this may be free time.

customers come in groups (lunch hour is when many shop) so the free time is a different part of the day and you send them home. When a clerk is counting cash they could serve the next customer. If there isn't a customer they could stock shelves or clean. stores might have one clerk doing nothing at a till but there are several more scattered around the store doing something else while waiting for a help needed call.

You also completely discounted the managers time counting cash in the backroom. That is more than an hours work in my experience, time that could be used for other things.

Re: Not paying with cash

#217

Post by aspenmayer »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #147
ekianjo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> profusion of "no cash accepted" signs How this is even legal baffles me

NYC outlawed cashless operations after it started to become popular and the marginalized were increasingly locked out of everyday commerce. Hopefully it catches on in the rest of the US.

I didn't know this. Thanks for the tip.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/Prohibition-of-Cashle...

You can even report establishments for refusing cash by category:

https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03302

Re: Not paying with cash

#218

Post by iwanttocomment »

cyberax wrote: post #172
iwanttocomment wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the US, it's absolutely allowed. Walmart, for example, will by default add in-store purchases using a credit card (and no other identifying information) to the purchase history on a Walmart.com account set up with the same credit card. You can only disable this tracking by going into Account > Settings > Privacy > Data Sharing in your Walmart.com account, where you'll find an option that states "Allow us to a…

That's because you allowed Walmart to do that when you signed for the account. It's buried somewhere in the ToS. They are not allowed to track you when you don't _have_ an account. With Apple Pay or Android Pay they won't even be able to do that because they get anonymous tokens and not the card number.

The Walmart/Walmart.com TOS and Privacy Policy documents only say:

> We collect your personal information from technology we use in and outside of our stores. For example, our point-of-sale terminals process your credit card information when you complete your purchase [...]

Which is pretty obvious. Nothing about them explicitly tracking in-store purchase history via credit card numbers, which as above, they certainly do and allow you to disable in your account settings.

As another example, southern grocer H-E-B is famous for not having loyalty cards and tracking in-store customer behaviors via credit card number, regardless of whether you have an HEB.com account. They then sell that data to vendors. [0]

This NYT article from several years ago verifies that Target ties all credit card purchases to a unique "guest ID". [1]

Can you cite the US federal regulation or Visa/Mastercard TOS that prohibits tracking customer purchase behavior by credit card number without consent? There may be state or local statutes I'm unaware of, but I'm confident there's nothing on a country-wide level.

You are absolutely correct that Apple Pay and Android Pay do not allow tracking in this manner due to anonymous tokenizing. But that's nothing new - going back to the subject of the article, tracking generally isn't possible with cash transactions as well.

[0] https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-custo...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

Re: Not paying with cash

#219

Post by XorNot »

al_borland wrote: post #156
normie3000 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wild amount of fraud. Is this US-specific? Are cards still using magstripes there?

Cards still have magstripes, but we generally use chip + signature or tap-to-pay now. I haven’t actually swiped my card in a couple years. Visiting Europe, I really like that the transaction is done right in front of you. The pain point is that my card is chip + signature, when everything there is chip + pin. When I last visited London I would stop into the store and went to the self-scan. I had to wait for the atten…

The problem with magstripes is I'm fairly sure there are some skimmers which basically read the card number off the mag-stripe when you insert it for a chip and pin transaction.

Because my card has been skimmed twice. The first time we were 100% it was a major retailer who was insisting my wife needed to swipe the card for a particular discount, but the second time the only in-person use we could remember was at a service station where we inserted the card to pay and pretty much the whole card goes in the slot.

You can read the magstripe from as little as about 1/3rd of the strip...though it's also possible someone is just embedding a scanner element to optically grab numbers nowadays, the tech is certainly cheap enough.

The trouble is it's really hard to reliably demagnetize a credit card, and the magstripe-less card rollout is being done incredibly slowly.

Newer cards don't have embossed numbers on the front anymore, only on the back, and these days I put electrical tape over them just in case someone is watching cameras. But I can't delete the magstripe and be sure it's gone reliably.

Re: Not paying with cash

#220

Post by JohnFen »

I almost never use my card in everyday transactions anymore. I pay with cash probably 90% of the time. For me, this has been an amazingly good thing that has improved my happiness level. Just being able to avoid seeing those damned tip prompts alone is well worth it.
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