Yeah. My local drycleaner has a $10 minimum for CCs. At least it does when Mama-san is running the register. Kid-san & Papa-san are much more forgiving. One pair of pants doesn’t meet the $10 minimum; that’s only $9. But particularly now that I’m retired, one pair of dry cleanable slacks every couple of weeks is all I have for them.
I’ll be dropping one pair some later today. Next time I pick up it’ll either be CC or my last use of their store.
Yes, the CC monopolies are rapacious bastards. Just like the retail real estate landlord cartels. And the laundry equipment suppliers. It sucks being small business since you have so little, often zero, leverage over your suppliers. It sucks more to take that out on your customers who have even less leverage. Except the leverage of their willingness to go down the street.
I do this for the remaining dregs on the gift cards.
We received about CAD$6000 in MasterCard gift cards after being bumped from a Delta flight in March, each for $250.
Amazon allows you to buy gift cards in any amount, so I just added each card to my Amazon account and added the $12.18 or whatever balance was left on the card to my Amazon balance.
If a cashier told me that, I walk out leaving them to reshelve everything and say, “In that case I will shop at a store that does.” Of course here in Canada we’ve been using $1 and $2 coins for a couple decades. But a store might legally refuse pennies although the government will still redeem them.
That’s outrageous! If an airline pulled that on me, I would start yelling the name Gabor Lukacs which would put the fear of god into them. See Gábor Lukács | Air Passenger Rights.
The dollar coin thing happened in the US, but a few years ago, I took a couple of pennies into RBC. I’d found a couple over the years, and I couldn’t bring myself to just throw them away. The bank tried to tell me they wouldn’t accept them. Just not trained properly: Canadian money is always valid, if only for exchange for current coins / notes / electronic pennies. They did take them once a manager explained that to the teller.
This was actually voluntary on a flight from Rome to Toronto via JFK. For a 24 hour wait, we received USD$6000 in vouchers, hotel rooms, meals, and an upgrade to business class all the way home so no bad blood with Delta at all. They have a gift card portal where you can chose prepaid MC/Visa, Amazon, Uber, Home Hardware, a bunch of others. We chose mostly MC for their flexibility, but then you are left with the small amounts.
While I appreciate Gabor’s advocacy, he sometimes appears that we should demand compensation because WestJet ran out of Diet Coke.
I would think a lot of those small business are cheating the tax man, not trying to avoid transaction fees. They aren’t reporting the cash sales.
I don’t know which countries you’re talking about but in France, Benelux, Czechia and Germany I have made literally thousands of purchases on cards and have yet to encounter a “sorry, card reader is broken” event. There are vendors (fewer every year) who are cash only. But they don’t say the machine is broken.
Do you actually know Gabor? He is nothing if not unreasonable. I met him when he was 14 and attending a math conference that he was utterly unprepared for and was asking totally idiotic questions. But I have gotten to know him a bit and on a personal level he is very friendly.
I had thought from your posting that they had refused a refund for a cancelled flight and given you credits instead. But it seems they delated a flight for a day and then indemnified you that way. In that case, I would conjecture that you have already benefitted from Gabor’s activism.
Our Safeway seems to know the balance just fine. When we have a small amount left on a gift card we split the payment, and there has never been a problem. I’ve never tried on self checkout though, that would probably be a problem. But our checkers are pretty with it.
If it’s a Safeway gift card they do. If it’s a Visa/MC/Amex branded gift card, I don’t think they could possibly know. The information flow is just request/authorize. It only returns accept or decline (and retain card, though many retailers don’t do that anyway).
As a travel geek, I know him only from his reputation and press coverage. He has had a significant impact on the new Air Passenger Rights in Canada, I am light heartedly joking about his positions. Canada was far behind the EU before the new regulations, the US still lags both.
My flight wasn’t delayed, it was overbooked and they wanted our seats. If the whole flight was delayed by a day we would have received 600 Euros each, so we did significantly better than that.
Drives me batty when we get a new cashier doing something like that. Yes, we take dollar coins. We take half dollars. We take $2 bills. If you’re not sure of a bill ask for help because we also take really old bills that “look funny”. (We do not, of course, take “funny money” but you’re supposed to ask for a manager if anything seems off).
It used to be that way, but for quite a few years now our registers can, in fact, see the unused amounts on the MC/Visa cards and apply them to purchases. This may not be universally available.
It’s possible. The store I work for is part of a larger corporation that is willing to take a small loss to keep customers happy (up to a point) so we’ll do it. Smaller operations may not.
My local cleaners is the same way now, but I luckily pretty much always work at least 4 days a week and shirt cleanings are now $2.50, so I don’t have a problem. And I wouldn’t have a problem paying cash either, and did for a long time before the shirt price got that high just because I’d rather not hear them complain about me paying cash (back before it became an apparent rule according to the sign that went up a few months ago) compared to the few cents of rewards.
You could always report such companies to Visa/MC and see what happens if you’re happy potentially never shopping there again.
For cleaners though, they have to have some system of keeping track of your order, and that’s going to keep some sort of trail. If they keep it only on paper, then OK, but I suspect most places have switched to electronic systems that would leave an obvious trace if things were deleted. That’s why I never had a problem paying cash to them. Even the place that I went to a few weeks and wrote tickets by hand still used electronic tracking of things, because the last time I went in there they claimed I hadn’t prepaid because that’s what the computer said. Easy decision to never go there again, especially since it wasn’t the first time that I felt they were doing something sleazy.
When I buy a pack of gum at 7-11 for 85 cents I charge it to my CC with no fuss. I do not use cash, period, except for emergencies. When some rando retailer insists on that antiquated crap it’s a direct annoyance to me. Even more so when their prices seem set up so the standard purchase is just below the threshold of what they’re willing to charge to a CC.
Yes I get rewards points, but it’s not the nickel-and-dime purchases that run up my monthly total. I don’t care about the points foregone on a $8 purchase. I care about fiddling with stupid cash and stupider coins.
I have $200 sitting on my desk for probably the last 2 years. I think one of my kids received cash in birthday cards and traded it with me so they could buy something online with my credit card. My current wallet does not even hold cash, cards only.
