I know of a place that is the opposite, they take cards but not cash or checks.
It actually depends on the credit card service as to how long it takes to get your money.
We had one (now history) that took 48 hours do deposit Visa and Mastercard, and 6 days for America Express, at about 3.5% fee. We found another that has everything deposited by the next morning (including AMEX), and charges 2%.
And as this eliminates the possibility of a bounced check, we are pretty pleased with them.
There are a lot of reasons to not accept credit cards. Its not just the percentage they take and the transaction fee, those are often set low so they can nail you on other costs, ones they don’t tell you about: Security service fees, nuisance fees, machine fees, accounts fees, pretend-to-have-customer-service fees, cancellation fees. It is amazing how fast they pile up and these are folks who essentially have access to your bank account.
There are a lot of bad guys in the credit card merchant accountservice. Tons. They present a lot of bait, tell a shitanic load of lies (the recent addition of chip cards was a gold mine to them), and hide as many fees as they can when presenting their service. If you balk at the fees later on you’ll find out that cancelling the account costs money - sometimes the amount quoted is more than is legal to chrage for cancelled a CC account but nobody can really challenge these people. To do so you have to make arrangements with your bank to make sure they don’t yank some more money out when you leave. Not easy.
Then there is the ‘security’ bullshit they peddle. They’ll charge you for security audits where you have to take a questionaire that assumes you are a business with an 80 man IT team devoted solely to security issues. (“Do you have daily audits of your Intraweb SSCPISO?”). The security audits are just excuses to jam you into a higher rate than promised after they find some security error (“Your card machine is onlt 30 feet from the door, what were you thinking!”). Actual issues that might matter mean you don’t even get the promised rates - the reason Diners don’t often take cards is because they have a high rotation of staff and security can be an genuine issue. So rates for them are much higher to start. Most won’t bother.
Meanwhile, for all their concentration on security minutia, they leave the front door unlocked and nobody watching it. Vendors are never given an easy method of reporting potential fraud or abuse - while most won’t care there are plenty of times where a simple “this is PROBABLY FUCKING FRAUD” button would work wonders. One business I worked with had 100 attempted fake web orders from one location, of which a half dozen got through. But nope. Can’t be bothered. Local law enforcement couldn’t do anything without the help of the gateway or merchant account company.
There is a place by my house called: Mamma’s Chicken and Waffles.
One of the reviewers on Google said: “It’s a cash only place. That’s how you know it’s the real deal.”
Not sure what he meant by that.
Oh yeah I forgot we have a local pizza place that doesn’t take plastic. It also doesn’t deliver.
They’ve expanded to 3 locations and are always packed, so it’s not really hindering them.
I’ve often paid for items at CostCo with my Visa debit card. Does the above policy affect debit cards at all?
The owner’s labor ought to be counted as having a cost/value as well, unless the owner is for some reason working at his own business for free. Not just carrying a bag to the bank on the way home – you have to count the cash and make sure it balances against daily sales, too. And if you’re short a $20 you have to either find it or the math error before you take the deposit anywhere.
So, the cash counted itself into the bag at the end of the day, never got lost or stolen or miscounted, never resulted in higher insurance premiums, and the bank didn’t charge for night deposits or for withdrawals of small bills and coins?
Maybe it’s cheaper than taking cards but it’s certainly not free.
We ate at a restaurant in downtown Chicago a couple summers ago. We needed a breakfast place that was near-ish our hotel. Three different people said “go to so-and-so - but remember they are cash only!”.
They weren’t hurting for business.
Yeah… I don’t get it. If even food trucks accept plastic, how can’t a much bigger business set it up? It sounds to me like business owners are old crusty uninformed cranks who can’t be bothered to find out how the modern world works.
Hookers take credit cards these days.
I did not know that.
Purchasing the sacred herb is still a cash only transaction, though.
I live in Amish country, as well, and many Amish-owned businesses do take plastic, especially when they’re selling furniture and other high-value goods. They employ non-Amish people to run the machines and take care of other responsibilities of owning a business that the Amish faith won’t let them do otherwise.
This.
I bought a big shed from an Amish lumberyard. They delivered it on a flatbed truck driven by a non-Amish employee. The Amish passenger instructed him on exactly how to back the rig up, then he instructed him step-by-step on how to slide my shed into position.
It would have been way easier for the Amish guy to do all this directly, as he was the brains of the duo. But no, he told him which button to push and for how long, etc…
There’s a paradigm change going on. It used to be that a credit card offered more security for a high fee (your receipts can’t be robbed, and credit card fraud was much harder to carry off than bouncing a bad check.) So merchants who trusted their customers and were in low crime areas routinely refused credit cards. I used to shop one place that wouldn’t take credit cards, but if i didn’t have enough cash, the owner would just tell me to bring the rest the next time i came by.
Now credit cards are cheaper, credit card fraud is much more common, and many customers, especially younger customers, don’t carry cash. So now it is more about convenience for you customers.
Thus, the “real deal” is a place with regulars and trust, but it’s becoming an obsolete signal. The shop that used to offer me personal credit with no records started taking cards about 8 years ago.
Now you might think a store that didn’t bother to take your card might skimp on other ways. That’s absolutely not how it used to work.
Heaven on Seven, right?
Not to mention the cost of paying someone to walk the deposit down to the bank, or the opportunity cost of doing it yourself.
Checks are now a form of electronic transaction, to all intents and purposes.
I didn’t know the garage doesn’t take cards! I almost always rush my tickets so I have to get cash anyway and I always just paid out of that. Good to know so I won’t be blindsided one day.
The thing I wonder about with small businesses that don’t take credit/debit cards is whether they aren’t cutting off their nose to spite their face. Maybe there’s a 3%? (WAG, there) fee for the processing of transactions, but that might be a small price to pay if people walk out of the store without buying because they can’t use plastic.
Personally, I rarely carry more than $50 in cash, and usually much less than that. I use my Discover card for everything, even small purchases (with the possible exception of a soda at 7-11 or something like that), then pay off the balance at the end of the month. Hence, no finance charges, and the cash-back bonus that I get is completely free money that I can use when I need it.
So, say I walk into a used bookstore and find $50 worth of books that I would like to buy. But the store doesn’t take plastic, and I have only $18 in cash on me. If I really really, ***really ***want the books, I *might *ask the proprietor to hold the books while I go to an ATM and get cash, but, realistically, most of the time that isn’t going to happen. More often, I will spend a much smaller amount out of the cash I have for the books I want the very most, or I’ll simply leave without buying anything. Probably most often, it will be the latter. And I’m sure I am not unique in this. So, how much revenue is the store losing because of its no-plastic policy? Is it better to have, for example, $750 in sales for the day and collect $750, or to have $900 in sales and collect $873 (and even that latter number is an exaggeration, since it’s unlikely that 100% of their sales will be via plastic, though that’s what I have assumed for the purpose of illustration)?
3% fee + per transaction cost + equipment fees + security fees + reporting fees + whatever fees the merchant account provider thinks they can get away with. Plus dedicated line cost (or secure DSL cost), it adds up. Most business shrug and take it on the chin, but a few can decide the hassle and various add-on-fees are not worth it.