Believe it. That’s why they have signs all over the place about not having much money in the register, etc. When I used to work for 7-Eleven, we were told specifically to not accept anything above a $20 bill and to refuse the sale if they had nothing smaller. We did not want people thinking we had a bunch of loot in the register.
The major drawback of paying with a credit or debit card at places like gas stations is the high incidence of fraud. I’ve now had a hold put on my card twice because it turned out I used it at a gas station which was suspected of having an employee who was scamming cards (in neither case was I actually hit, fortunately). After the second time, I decided to use cash in such places if at all possible.
Advantages of using cash:
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Caryying cash for day-to-day expenses (coffe/lunch/gas) limits impulse spending. If I have $60 in my pocket and I know I need to fill up my gas tank with $50 and I need to buy lunch then I won’t buy that pretty new nail polish. Withdrawing only the cash I need for a certain day is an easy way to stay within my budget.
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No surprise overdrafts. I’m not dirt poor but I’m not rich either. There is no such thing as a cash cushion in my checking account. I have a savings but it is necessary for me to keep that separate from checking so that it’s harder to spend it. My bank is not good about tracking debit card transactions. It takes days sometimes for them to show up and I’m not always great about writing down my transactions. This has lead to too many “goddammit” moments.
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If someone steals my wallet/purse it doesn’t matter too much. All they’re getting is the little bit of cash I had on hand. They can’t do any other financial damage. (My license, credit cards, etc are kept in a wallet in my car when I’m out and about just in case of emergency).
I’m sticking with cash. Plus, the little shop near my office that the sells the best fresh chocolate chip cookies has a minimum debit card amount that necessitates a purchase of 4 cookies instead on 1. Cash is much easier on my waistline. 
Don’t blame the bank. Usually the reason these transactions take several days to show up is that the merchants are slow in processing their transactions.
I’m sure it does. I’ve worked gas stations for several years and the only time there was ever a counterfeit bill successfully passed on my shift was a $5. That probably only worked because 1. Nobody counterfeits $5s (and this was a lousy one to boot) so it wasn’t an automatic check and 2. We probably got it when we were slammed as either a single bill or in a stack. $20s, $50s and $100s all got checked right away. I’ve had people try to pass those off, but they’ve never succeeded.
Besides, we all know that only drug dealers and pimps/prostitutes deal in cash. Why would reputable businesses want to deal with a cash using nere-do-well like yourself?
Honestly, won’t someone think of the children? or you know, something like that. ::hum::
Well, just move here to New Jersey. You not only don’t have to prepay, you can pay with cash any time you want, and you don’t even have to get out of the car once.
and they pump it for you.
Oh this is my pet peeve:
Users of cash have to pay more just to protect credit card users.
Credit card users are protected by law from losing more than $50.
If they lose their card and someone else uses it they are only out $50.
The credit card company figures this into the percentage that they charge stores.
Since credit card companies charge stores a percentage of the sales on that card–
stores charge cash customers that percentage more to make up for it.
Actually, I think this is Visa’s rules , and page 10 of the PDF states that adding surcharges and minimum purchase amounts are violations of the agreement (against the rules).
However, I note this part of your quote:
I remember when I had a Bank of America ATM card, and a seperate Bank of America debit card. Now those functions are combined into one card, which has a Visa logo. I suspect that Arco does not accept “Visa” cards, but does accept ATM cards, with a surcharge. The visa rules are not coming into play here, becuase it has nothing to do with Visa - it is an ATM card transaction. The confusion, IMHO, comes in becuase of the dual functionality of that card.
Of course, I have not studied this in depth. It is just how I have noticed things over time, and I might well be incorrect.
That’s not true. I’ve had a debit at Wegmans hang from Thursday til Tuesday. At my last bank, a Thursday debit would show up Friday. Wegmans isn’t going to wait for their cash.
I live in Oregon and ARCO plays their cute little forty five cent trick here too. It really pisses me off, because none of the ARCO stations have card sliders on the pumps, so if you go to ARCO you have to get out of your car, go inside the store and wait for them to call your pump number–this is regardless of whether you’re paying with cash or card, by the way. Since Oregon is one of two remaining states where you don’t pump your own gas, not only are you getting it stuck up your ass and broken off to the tune of half a buck for daring to use your card (and who the HELL is sanguine about carrying enough cash for a fill up THESE days?!) you also still have to GET OUT OF YOUR CAR IN THE COLD AND WET, thereby negating one of the greatest advantages of living in Oregon in the first place. Me, I say fuck ARCO, I go to civilized stations where I hand the nice person my card through the window, listen to the radio while they pump my gas, and it costs the same as it says on the pump.
Wrong. Robbery has nothing to do with it. It’s all about reducing the likelihood of getting hit with a counterfeit (plus, it’s often a pain in the ass to get change for larger bills). To combat robbery, stores do register skims–taking excess cash and larger bills out of the cash drawers and putting it in the safe or deposit them in the bank.
Another reason is that these stores try to minimize cash in the drawer. So if a customer uses a larger bill for a small purchase, you’d need to use too much of the cash as change, leaving you without any for the rest of the shift. (No cite, though. I’ve never had a retail job, but my brother had a couple, and I think he regularly inserted excess cash into the drop safe, to which he had no access.)
Normally, I’d agree, but in ARCO’s case, it’d cost me more than the surcharge in increased gas prices to go elsewhere. I dunno if my principles in this case are worth that much. Besides, I’d just be enriching the gas companies that increase their rates for a bunch of additives that I don’t need. 
I think you are wrong. If you are only going to take bills up to $20 you only need $20 bucks in the register. If you are going to take $100s you need $100 in the register to make change with.
What is a more inviting target, a register with $20 or one with $100?
And what happens with the next person who wants to pay with a twenty? And the next? And the one after him? You see where I’m going with this. Obviously, you need to keep enough in the drawer so you don’t have to keep running to the safe for change, and that’s going to be around $100, give or take, anyway. Back when I managed a Radio Shack, we’d usually open with $150 per drawer and that’s about what we’d leave when doing skims and midday deposits. During the busy hilday season, we might open with $200 or more. So, the capacity to take large bills is there anway, to some degree. And you don’t normally get that many, unless you’re a high-ticket item store. A few a day, maybe?
Nope. Robbery has a lot to do with it. Convenience stores and the like will take fifty and hundred dollar bills…as long as they don’t have to give back more than about $20 in change. If you want to do your weekly grocery shopping at the corner store, and the total comes to $95, the cashier will most likely take your $100 bill, since s/he can make change for it. If you just want to buy a six pack, no, your C note won’t be accepted, primarily because the cashier shouldn’t have enough money in the drawer to give you proper change. Counterfeit bills are a concern, but the main concern is the risk of robbery. If a potential robber KNOWS that Store X doesn’t have more than $20 in the drawer, he’ll go somewhere else. Sure, the convenience stores still get robbed, but that’s because many robbers are not coolly considering risks and benefits.
This is taught in business classes, and is also taught to cashiers who handle a lot of cash (as opposed to checks and credit cards).
When I was a cashier at a convenience store, we had a safe that we could retrieve money from. We could push a button on the safe, and a tube would come out with four fives, or two tens, or twenty singles, or a roll of coins, depending on what we’d push. We could only push the button every so often, and we could put our extra fives and tens in a tube and deposit them in the safe, too. The most we could extract from the safe at one time was $20. If we ran short of change, then we’d have to ask the customer for a smaller bill, or to wait until several other people had come along and built up a reserve of ones and fives in our drawer. Each time we received a twenty, we dropped it in the safe IMMEDIATELY. We could get fired for not doing so. We’d also get fired if we had too much currency in our drawers. When I worked in the box office of a theater, it was about the same…only I didn’t have a safe to get money out of, I had to call upstairs for change from the main safe. I still had a drop safe and I was expected to use it. I believe that the float in the convenience store was about $25 and the theater was about $35…I might be wrong, though, it’s been more than a decade since I worked the convenience store, and almost a decade since the theater.
I just can’t stand shops that don’t take debit cards, or those that take £5 minimum purchases, or don’t take it for mobile phone top ups etc etc.
Its a pain to have to find an ATM, which are quite often out of tens after everyone’s had a big weekend or week day out and don’t dish out fives any more as a matter of course. Then to have to carry a big pocket of change when the sum paid is an odd amount.