This thread makes me weep. Anyone that thinks Credit Cards are faster or cheaper has a seriously poor understanding of how a business (and money in general) works.
First the merchant pays a ~3% service charge on everything that goes through the credit card machine. In many cases that is augmented by an additional per item fee, or a per transaction fee ranging going as high as 50¢ per.
Second, the merchant needs to maintain a T1 line or several dedicated phone lines for the credit card machines at several hundred dollars a month.
Take a step back and think about that. People freak out when they are asked to raise their Sales Tax from 7.2% - 7.5%. People lose their minds when Democrats are elected because their Federal Income Taxes could go from 33%-35% on certain brackets. Now, these same people will giddily hope for a Credit Card dominated economy where EVERY TRANSACTION carries an additional 3-4% charge? That is a much bigger chunk of your income than anything Washington or local governments will do to you from election cycle to election cycle.
So, asking if CASH is somehow costly is completely and utterly asinine.
Mind you, these 3% fees that are being charged to the business (which you pay for directly with additional markup to maintain margins in the goods you purchase) are held down by the fact that cash is available as a market competitor. If cash were to disappear, or shrink to a very small proportion, in our economy business owners will have no choice to do business using credit and debit. That would mean that Visa/MC/Amex would essentially be able to change anything they wanted in fees. Fees that we’d directly pay for. As the banks continue to consolidate and the credit card issuers are already monolithic there’d be ZERO pressure to contain these fees.
Cash, while not free to produce and use as a country, is profitable. The US Treasury turns a profit and supplies our federal budget, in effect reducing the tax burden. Using credit would transfer that wealth creation to privately owned (and recently proven to be greedy and destructive on the whole) banks! Not to mention the fucking phone companies/utilities getting 8 and 10 access points in every business as opposed to the 2 the phone/internet uses normally.
So, you people think that transferring to a cash free society would be convenient? Really? Have you used your deductive reasoning skills at all?
I also find this idea that cash is somehow slower than credit to be bafflingly stupid. You might talk about the ONE old lady struggling to dig out her exact change but that’s what, 1 of every 10,000 customers? And how fast do you think she’d be trying to figure out the speedpass and touch screen?
Work for 15 minutes in any retail environment and you will instantly loathe the use of credit cards for every minor purchase. They waste epic amounts of time. The Speedpass things at the grocery store, 7-11 or McDonalds where you don’t have to sign and can swipe ahead of time or while odering are in the VAST minority. Most places don’t have them and have dedicated credit card machines that require them to initiate a completely new process (in addition to the register functions that they still need to do) to run the credit card and they don’t always respond instantly. Most places still require a signature or a PIN, two things you shouldn’t want to share 50 times a day no less, for any purchase and that takes, much, much longer than a cash transaction.
People. Cash is your friend. Credit Cards are great at the gas station so you don;'t need to go inside. They are stellar for the internet and big ticket item purchases. If you use it at the 7-11 and McDonalds you are throwing away your money and bleeding our economy further in needless administration and service fees.
Finally, Cash is essentially no-cost for a business. The time it takes to cash up is much faster than the time it takes to total up and process credit card receipts. If those receipts involve tipping you can triple it. Banks don’t generally charge businesses for cash deposits and big businesses pay services to come and claim their cash for a fee that pales in comparison to the fee they pay to their credit card processing machines.