181–190 of 325 posts
My take (as an American) on the one reason why cashless sucks: exorbitant transaction fees. 3% plus 50 cents is ridiculous, it should be like 0.1% at most for payment processor infrastructure.
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Can you cite an example of where Canadian protests by "lefties" took over a major public road for weeks on end, and disrupted the lives of thousands of citizens, harassing them, depriving them of sleep, preventing their ability to get to/from their homes and businesses? I can tell you're already very convinced of who was right and wrong in this and you're trying to make this a left vs right thing, but there are limit…
Can you elaborate why it is "and/or government". Why is it acceptable that the government by-pass the normal legal system in dealing with protestors?
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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 t…
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Somehow I don't agree that it is a good idea to succumb the entire population to a known disease vector and encumber society with the massive administration and physical costs of dealing with cash, just to spite a bogeyman that's "stealing your independence".
It's all fun and games and bogeymen until you get hit with capital controls and you're limited to 70 EUR/day cash withdrawals. The happy path is great until it's not. You can think "it won't happen to me" all you want, but that doesn't mean it won't.
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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…
I worked in a smaller, independent guitar store for a few years in the 90s. We received enough cash and checks that once a day someone would have to walk over to the “night deposit” slot and toss a bag in. Our cash handling cost was equal to my salary for the 30 minutes it took me to make that walk, plus the risk that I would get mugged ($0 lost over a few years.) Often the owner would rake out enough to cover his sp…
- dealing with fake notes,
- mistakes in handling notes and change (mistaking a ten for a twenty, etc.)
- theft from the store (not just mugging on the way to the safety deposit box)
- employee theft,
- reduced transaction capacity; cash transactions can take much longer (customers finding the cash, employee counting it, employee making can age)
- requirement to ‘cash up‘ at the end of the day (I.e. ensure the till takings match stock sold)
- occasional trips to the bank to get change (which must be during bank working hours)
For an independent guitar store some may not be relevant, but for some businesses they could be significant.
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.
Not coming out here for or against cashless, but if things were that bad cash would be the least of my problems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40839300
"They take away your freedom in one area X, and when they want to take away your freedom in another area Y you go, it's ok, we have bigger problems like X".
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This is weird. I've never been charged a fee for using Interac. Sure, there are accounts for which you are discouraged from transacting daily, but this is true in the United States as well, in my experience. No one is being forced to use an inappropriate account type as a daily driver. Most accounts have a minimum balance requirement, which is usually pretty low, to avoid any fees. ATM fees on the other hand are a di…
This is mostly a problem that affects poorer people, I suspect. I know people living paycheck-to-paycheck, who can't leave thousands of dollars lying around in their checking account, who are hesitant to use Interac because of the fees. Also, most people don't go to the trouble to shop around banks looking for a better deal.
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The wiki article you linked specifically says it's for more then war like conditions. "take extraordinary temporary measures to respond to public welfare emergencies, public order emergencies..."
Totally fair. A better criticism of the government's choice might be whether or not the trucker protest constituted a legitimate emergency.
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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 t…
Why oppose? Privacy. Freedom. Democracy. Equality.
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It's all fun and games and bogeymen until you get hit with capital controls and you're limited to 70 EUR/day cash withdrawals. The happy path is great until it's not. You can think "it won't happen to me" all you want, but that doesn't mean it won't.
How will cash help against capital controls, exactly? Unless you are poor, you never have more than a tiny fraction of your wealth in cash anyway. So when capital controls are declared, you will still be screwed.