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Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

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171–180 of 325 posts

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#171
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also problematic for the thousands of solo micro-businesses that operate in markets and pop-ups now (i.e. Etsy IRL). Most of them have a phone and a Square dongle, and that's it. Asking all those one-person shops and merchants to start carrying around a float and writing out paper receipts (or having some kind of battery-powered till+printer) is a pretty big burden.

Stores have been doing this since the dawn of...stores. Or at least when currency was first invented. There are very established processes and practices for this sort of thing. It's a cost of doing business, in the same way people pay for rent etc. for their stores.

Right, but now there are more efficient systems (the aforementioned Square dongle). We usually welcome technological progress that reduces costs, why opppose it in this case? The colourful pieces of paper and specially squished lumps of metal have been obsoleted. The solution isn't to force people to keep using cash, it's to make an electronic money system that has the good properties cash has (issued and backed by the government; directly tranferable between payer and payee; mostly anonymous but theoretically traceable in case of massive theft/fraud).

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#172
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there can't be any such guarantee, because a centralized system is too easy to take control of. If a government at some point wants to freeze your assets, you're done. With cash, at least you have some options.

By the same logic, if the government wants to murder you, it can, so why live?

Just to go with this weird analogy, yes, I'll prefer to be immortal rather than to trust that the government won't try to murder me.

Don't complain to me if this doesn't make sense, you started it.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#173
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario. I don't mean to be obtuse, but how would cash solve this? If someone is bigoted against you and won't take cash from you, or marks up the price or engages in some other less obvious manipulation, an…

For credit cards, my access can be disabled when the two networks are coerced into blacklisting me. For cash, the imaginary evil powers would have to convince tens of thousands of individual stores to do the same. And even then, it would be impossible to enforce, because with a cash payment, there is no record that could be checked to enforce compliance.

> For cash, the imaginary evil powers would have to convince tens of thousands of individual stores to do the same.

You seem to be implying that this is somewhat unlikely.

History is full of this exact thing happening.

Recent history.

Until the 1970s in the US it was legal, and common, for businesses to refuse to do business with a woman without a male's permission. There were only a precious few municipalities where this was not the norm.

Grocery stores until the mid-1900s did not actually sell products to women. Women would pick out and receive products and a bill would be sent to her male supervisor for his approval and payment. Even in large cities, this wasn't limited to the stereotypical geographic regions that seem to thrive on oppressing minorities (although the large coastal cities were the first to do away with it), it was very often illegal for a woman to live alone so single women would live in boarding houses with chaperones and curfews.

There seems to be a great cultural amnesia about all of this happening-- despite there being millions of people who are still alive to which it happened.

My mother joined the Women's Army Air Force in the early 1970s because she could not rent, open a bank account, use store credit, or obtain automobile insurance without her father's permission-- which he would have given but she being who she was (and still is) wouldn't ask for in a million years. Servicemember-associated organizations had no such compunction.

There is no functional difference in "opressivenessabilityivity" between cash and cards.

There is no nameless, faceless, "them" waiting to oppress you, oppression is a function of broader civil society.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#174

The comments here are truly bizarre. It seems like a few commenters here feel that this is an opportunity to derail on-topic discussion in order to forward some political agenda. The truth is Canada is already a cashless society. Cities, rural areas, farmers markets, country fairs... I haven't carried cash for years and I can't remember the last time I needed to. Earlier this year I went on a vacation to a remote tro…

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Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada's credit cards work on Visa, MasterCard, or Amex networks. However, debit cards work on a domestic network called Interac. About half of card transactions in Canada are debit card transactions. https://payments.ca/sites/default/files/PaymentsCanada_Canad... page 7 EDIT: In the past few years, many Canadian banks have started issuing dual-network debit cards that bear both Visa and Interac logos (sometimes Mast…

Sounds like a mirror of the Girocard here in Germany. My bank card now has both girocard and visa on it, and works online. Allegedly, Wero, coming from the banks of the EU, should in the next year or two, unite all the similar national systems across Europe in to one, I guess kind of like UnionPay.

Same in Norway, we've always had BankAxxept and Visa on debit cards and most credit cards have been Mastercard. BankAxxpet handles the vast majority of transactions.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#176
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So no, they didn't.

Sure, and at first the Canadian government didn't force indigenous children into residential schools - it just withheld resources and services and used a monopoly on violence to make resistance untenable. Believing that's acceptable behaviour from your government, is certainly... a position.

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Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#177

Cashless is convenient but effectively amounts to automatic inflation. Not just from the merchant fees but making it easier to slowly raise prices/fees/tip %. Plus whatever % of the population is dumb enough to revolve credit and get buried in debt.

There's fees for handling cash as well. They're just less obvious. In the old days, those armoured vans used to have to go to stores every single day at peak times (Xmas, etc.). Plus you've got to pay for bags of change to be delivered. You've got to pay for a safe, insurance for your safe, plus a hard limit that safe is allowed to hold. If you're going to go over you need to request an on demand pickup from the cash…

Interestingly, in Australia there is a problem because the demand for cash has dropped so much that the remaining cash-transport monopoly is insolvent. The major banks and retailers just bailed it out: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/breaking-news/armaguard-to-...

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#178
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada's credit cards work on Visa, MasterCard, or Amex networks. However, debit cards work on a domestic network called Interac. About half of card transactions in Canada are debit card transactions. https://payments.ca/sites/default/files/PaymentsCanada_Canad... page 7 EDIT: In the past few years, many Canadian banks have started issuing dual-network debit cards that bear both Visa and Interac logos (sometimes Mast…

The dual-network cards are Visa/Mastercard "debit" cards, which look like a credit card but sometimes don't work like one. I never had a problem with my dual-network card when physically visiting the States, but for whatever reason, some online payment systems (especially ones in Canada) have trouble with it. And vendors are clueless as to what the problem is when the debit CC number fails to go through. Just recentl…

Why do you prefer debit over credit? Aren't the consumer protection benefits greater with credit cards?

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. We shouldn't make it easer for criminals to conduct terrorism, human trafficking, fraud etc just to make it slightly more economical for startups to compete with Visa/Mastercard.

When was the credit network used to finance terrorism? If we can't prevent terrorism then isn't it an advantage to have them move their funds on a network that can be completely traced and retroactively inspected? We'd prefer if terrorists use cash? Or we believe that if they can't use Amex it's impossible to use cash and therefore terrorism is defeated? Also, when the startups compete with Visa/Mastercard, they prov…

Gofundme. This was very common early on. People would create campaigns and then it would get funded by stolen credit cards and withdrawn.
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