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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

#461

Post by susiecambria »

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…

As a former manager of a liquor store, I didn't want my staff to do anything unusual. That was for me and the owner, per the owner's instructions.

It wasn't that they couldn't think about creative solutions, it's that we generally didn't want them to. There were serious implications for wrong decisions. For example, we couldn't sell a product for less than wholesale. The staff had no idea what the markup was and so couldn't know if a discount was above or below wholesale. If a product was sole for less than wholesale, the owner could have lost his license.

The wildest we got was when the computers crapped out. I told the staff to write down every transaction. Each transaction included the cost of the item, bottle deposit, and tax. On a Friday/Saturday night, we knew the top 10 item totals by heart and we were also good at counting back change.

When I was a regular run of the mill staffer at the store, I was happy to stay in my lane. The expectations were clear and that was good for everyone even if we, or customers, were sometimes inconvenienced.

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

#463

Post by noduerme »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #385
noduerme wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, both of those things mean participating in a debt-based system. If your money is all on loan from your credit card company, or in a bank that charges you fees to get it out, you literally have nothing. I don't give a flying fuck how expensive the hamburger is, the same thing applies to Dollar General or to tickets to the opera. A company FORCING consumers to use their money through a middle man bank creates a pr…

You must be using the wrong banks.

Are there retail banks in America which aren't run for profit? I wasn't aware. Should citizens be forced to keep their money with privately run institutions, which decide when and how and if they can access their money, in order to transact on the most basic level, in order to buy food? If so, the government effectively renounces its exclusive control of the currency.

Why do countries print currency? For the settlement of debts public and private. It's not merely a civil rights issue. It's a core governmental function to provide a public and universally accepted instrument of trade. Governments which partner with privately run banks and coerce citizens into using those banks are inherently corrupt.

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

#464

Post by noduerme »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #181
noduerme wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that it's immoral to punish people for have no bank credit, and even leaving aside the ethical implications it creates a split-level society that pushes part of the population further toward desperation and crime. Banning cash to allegedly keep workers safe is the ultimate whitewashing of corporate greed at the expense of workers and the public. This is a good law.

It's very strange that developing countries can go cashless, with everyone paying for everything on their smartphones, but a developed country like the US somehow can't.

Countries with weak control over mostly worthless currencies reach a point where it's more profitable for their government ministers to take kickbacks from the banks providing cashless services than it is for them to run a printing press anymore. It's hardly progress. The US still hasn't hit quite that level of corruption, and still has some control over its monetary policy.

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

#465

Post by acdha »

mikerg87 wrote: post #462

Can someone explain how this is possible? Doesn’t US currency have the phrase “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private” which I understood this to mean it should be accepted for settlement of financial transactions.

See https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm for the federal position - state law varies.

The reasoning I’ve heard behind this basically comes back to whether you have a choice: if my coffee shop says “no cash”, you can walk away just as you could if the sign says “formal dress required” or “no cell phones in use” – weird, perhaps, but it’s private property and both parties have the ability to walk away if they can’t agree on terms. Debts are different because they happen at a time remove, and the economy works a lot better if you don’t have something like a loan requiring repayment in notes from a particular bank which failed or, worse, was bought by your lender and is now playing games.

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

#466

Post by davchana »

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…

True. The only time I have walked out of store (maybe once or two times) is when I have already used card few times previously with unplanned $50+ purchases. Now this time I only need $5 thing, & they say there's charge of $0.50 for card.

I also was in your similar example. In US I have a car, so very rarely I use public transport which is not Bart. I landed in Toronto at 2am, got into Bus Google Maps told me, Bus driver said $2.50 fare, cash only. I gave him American 3 dollars, and he gave me Canadian $0.50 change back.

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

#467

Post by tjbiddle »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #351
tjbiddle wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why are you putting the onus on the retailer? Don't assume malice or intent from them. I operate online businesses; so 99% of my sales a…

> Why are you putting the onus on the retailer? Because it is their choice. > I'm happy to offer a discount if someone wants to pay via a non-credit card, but I don't raise my prices because of it This makes no sense to me. As the leader of the business, you have the option to 1) deny all credit cards 2) accept all credit cards, but not offer discount for debit cards 3) accept all credit cards, but offer a discount f…

My payment processors (Shopify, PayPal, Klarna, etc.) don't treat debit cards any differently than a credit card. Those are all huge payment processors; so it's not like a special snowflake here.

Since we're on HN, I'll mention Stripe. I don't use Stripe - but they act the same way.

All of these don't bill for "credit card" they bill for "card".

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

#468

Post by sbuttgereit »

curiousllama wrote: post #367
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…

I've generally noticed, when I think "why haven't they thought of X" - they have, and I'm not paying attention. > unaccounted for negative externalities The scale of these is uncertain, as are countervailing externalities. Looks like someone wrote a paper on it in the UK and came to the conclusion that it's not clear which is worse (i.e., the externalities either way aren't big/clear enough to matter) [1] > I would b…

Yes. They are uncertain, though I would contend that the vast majority of times that "negative externalities" come up in political argumentation that there's a certain disingenuousness about the reasoning: usually what counts as "negative" is presumed in such cases even though what is really counted as a negative or not is itself ambiguous. Ultimately the complexity of the subjects discussed most frequently leave so many variables on the table that such discussions seem, at least to me, silly and only serve the speaker's desire to rationalize their position. I do find that the discussion of "negative externalities" is really always from the progressive point of view: the phrase sounds intellectual and progressives tend to like that more than conservatives... modern conservatives have long ago abandoned the Buckley-esque pretentions of erudition and embrace simple in-your-face ignorance as more palatable.

This might not be clear... but I very much liked your response. I skimmed the report that you linked. I think they may have missed something in their analysis. I might be reading it wrong, but I think they've underplayed the transport of physical cash. They do mention it, but I didn't see it really discussed very thoroughly and daily transport of cash in the normal course of business is where I would think the greatest efficiency variances would be found. I kinda got the sense the transport they were talking about was between the mint and the banks and the banks and the mint: essentially the cost of transport to the government itself and not more broadly across the economy. That's not unreasonable for the report if they were trying to figure out the difference from their own perspective rather than the broader economy. However, there's significant transport for businesses that trade with cash. The first ~15 years of my career was spent in the corporate management of a few retail chains and providing professional services to others. Cash management was resource intensive relative to electronic payment processing. In one chain I worked in, armored trucks would do cash pickups from each of our stores daily (and sometimes more) and in many locations we had to have extra security staff to escort cash off the retail floor and watch the cash office (which means more people to transport, etc), not to mention other specialized equipment for dealing with cash (counters, etc). All of the chains I was involved in had some variance of this... at least the trucks showing up.

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

#469

Post by nirvdrum »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #362
nirvdrum wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge network effect that's effectively led to a 3% tax on the economy. Since every other store accepts credit cards, you need to too. It's not a case where a credit card allows someone that was going to buy a $500 TV to now spend $1,500. It's that you won't sell anything if you're a cash only business. And with Covid fewer people want to handle cash. Debit cards exist and partially solve the inconvenience o…

> There's a huge network effect that's effectively led to a 3% tax on the economy. Since every other store accepts credit cards, you need to too. The point of the whole sub thread is that a merchant can always accept a credit card but still incentivize use of debit or cash by giving a discount. > Debit cards exist and partially solve the inconvenience of holding cash. But, they're really inconvenient in other ways. W…

> The point of the whole sub thread is that a merchant can always accept a credit card but still incentivize use of debit or cash by giving a discount.

I was replying to the point made by the parent; it wasn't a meta comment for the whole thread. Most merchants aren't happily accepting a 3% surcharge because it's causing customers to spend more. While that happens and it's a big reason store-branded cards exist, I'd hazard to say most credit card transactions are for the same amount someone would pay with cash and the store just needs to eat the 3% because people don't like carrying cash.

>> Debit cards exist and partially solve the inconvenience of holding cash. But, they're really inconvenient in other ways. > What inconveniences?

I gave an example further down in that paragraph: "If there's a breach at a merchant and my number is stolen I don't have to worry about my checking account being screwed up for however long it takes to sort things out." It doesn't even need to be a security issue. There's been no shortage of incidents where a merchant double-charges, charges the wrong amount, doesn't release a hold in a timely manner, etc. where my cash is locked up with no recourse. To limit such impact, I have a daily spending limit set. That's helpful, up until I need to make a large ticket purchase. I'd love to see a debit card system that addresses these problems.

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

#470

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #357
nirvdrum wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Target also gives you a 5% discount for using their RedCard. It's your typical store-branded loyalty card. Except, instead of giving you "points" on your purchase you get an upfront discount. Target is unique in that they make this option available through a branded debit card for those that don't want or don't qualify for a credit card. But, it's not a discount specifically for paying with cash. > If a merchant want…

> Discounts get confusing and bump up against weird cases like minimum advertised pricing and potential taxation on the discount. I have never heard of this. Merchant gets the revenue, merchant pays the tax. If the debit price is $10, then the sales tax is on $10, and if the credit price is $13, then the sales tax is on $13. > Debit cards can get a bit weird when they function as credit cards. A customer may use a de…

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