I’ll trust in your hands-on business owner experience but I assumed any place still accepting checks had one of those readers that communicated with the bank and essentially treated the check like a debit card. “Hey, Customer wants to take $19 out of Account #XXXX, we good?” “Yeah, he’s good for it” “Cool”.
(Since I have plastic, the only checks I write these days are for student field trips so maybe I’m wrong about how it works)
yeah, I don’t mind being whooshed. 
But I am very definitely a sore loser, and still angry about my last flight thru Newark airport, where I went hungry because none of the food stands would accept my cash greenback dollar bills…you know… the legal tender.
Maybe I should have offered beaver pelts…because my cell phone wasn’t working.
Though I did get some “helpful” advice from the kid at the pizza counter who said he couldn.t sell me a slice, but there’s a cellphone shop right over there, so go get a phone and come back.
When I looked into the various check guarantee services available at the time, the percentage paid to the guarantor meant that I’d have to be doing 3X the dollar amount I was in checks before it became worthwhile.
Makes sense. The only places I usually see taking checks are grocery stores where it’s probably worth it to them. Less so for smaller places. Which, I guess, is why they don’t take checks.
There’s near zero risk of this from a fast food app.
Again, I highly doubt this happens from a fast food app.
This is just not gonna happen from signing up to a fast food app.
Bingo!
One sad day not far into the future we will be forced to buy all the good illegal stuff with an app that demands your fingerprints to install.
Mostly - there are a few cities where businesses essentially have to accept cash due to local laws. Sometimes they can comply by having a reverse ATM, where you put cash in and get a pre-paid card out
I can understand why a business would want advance payment before making up your order and sending someone out to bring it to you.
But I’d love to see Congress pass a law to require businesses to take cash for on-the-spot transactions up to a certain amount, like maybe under $100. People should be able to buy stuff with the nation’s legal tender in a face-to-face transaction.
I just got back from London and it was the same in lots of places, including where we were in Heathrow and the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. No cash, just CC and contactless payments.
I was in KFC about a week ago and the same thing happened to the guy who came in after me (while I was waiting for my order). He stepped aside, whipped out his phone, and (I assume) ordered it. It must have been a pretty good special.
A loyalty card gathers your data.
Quite possibly less of it than an app does, especially if you’re not careful about what you allow the app to do; but it still gathers your data.
I have a couple anyway, for a couple of places where I buy often enough for the payoff to be worth it. But I’m not real happy about it. Things used to be on sale for everybody when they were on sale, damn it. Get off my lawn!
This may depend on where you are and/or on what the business is.
I tell people at farmers’ market that I’ll take checks until I have a problem. In about 30 years I’ve never had a problem – except that recently I have the problem that almost nobody is carrying a check around with them any longer.
My phone doesn’t download any apps it didn’t come with; and didn’t come with anything relevant for making payments. It’s also the only phone I can find that I can reasonably carry around with me all the time and expect it to survive. I’m not going to buy an entire additonal phone plus service for it in order to be able to pay for things, or to carry a second device around with me. I do carry a credit card and some cash.
I always gave a phone #, address, etc., I just never gave real information. The store got information on a customer, they just couldn’t tie it back to me. I don’t think you can do that with most apps, at the very least, don’t you need to give them a real phone # to get a setup text?
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I’ve had my own bank account since at least HS, & can’t imagine living w/o one but there are millions of unbanked in this country. I’m sure they pay more in fees that I do at a traditional bank & it’s probably harder for them to get (& payoff) a credit card but there are still a lot of people who deal in cash.
Yes, it was primarily a location thing. It is a rural county that was particularly hit hard. I got not only NSF checks, but also checks written on accounts that had been closed for years.
So exactly what types of payments do these non-cash places take?
The only situation I have ever personally seen of not taking cash is gas stations after hours (the pumps are available 24 hours a day and take debit/credit cards at the pump when the main store is closed.)
I indirectly work for a company that provides such services. They have a giant, GIANT data set that includes all sorts of information on nearly everyone over 18. A customer comes to us with their own, private data set and says, “Of this info we have, here’s what identifies our best customers. We want more people like that.” My company then crunches that data to find appropriate marketing targets in the large data set and develops campaigns around that. It’s a big business.
Mostly cards, either directly - enter your card info at checkout or indirectly - entered your card info once when you setup the app or phone/watch-based pay. Some places will take mobile payments - Zelle, Venmo, etc.
Really anything that isn’t cash or a paper check - credit/debit cards for sure but also Venmo, Apple pay , Android Pay , Pay Pal , Zelle. I even see street carts that accept Venmo/Zelle
Main thing (I think):
“Legal Tender” doesn’t mean what people think it means.
In this area we have a lot of Old Order Mennonites. Most of them are carrying neither phones nor credit cards, and don’t go online. (They do have landline phones at home.)
Some of their businesses do take credit cards; some don’t. They all take cash. So, generally, do local businesses run by non-Mennonites (or by members of more liberal Mennonite groups, who may use modern phones and the net.)
I doubt, however, that the Old Order are generally trying to order Door Dash. I expect they do a lot more cooking at home than most other people now do.