I want to pay in cash

The BBQ Pit
41

That was our main reason for not accepting big bills when I managed a little pizza place. It’s definitely annoying, since a lot of people order pizza in large amounts and would rather break out large bills. But it’s also annoying having the bank phone you and tell you that the bills you are trained to check are counterfeit anyway. Right before Canada switched to new designs for the fifty, we were getting five fakes a week.

As well, the drivers wear nametags and signs and carry fliers and pretty much have tattooed on their foreheads “Driver carries less than $20.” Hard to change a hundred when you’re only carrying two fives and change. I’m not sure if it actually prevents any robberies, but we lose a lot less money to the robber this way.

I use my debit card for ev-er-y-thing. In Canada, every place (barring the rarest of rare exceptions, like hot dog stands) takes Interac and I don’t pay fees. Occasionally, some business do charge a little surcharge for using it, and some delivery places charge a larger one (about a buck) for use of their remote debit machines.

I like it, cause, well, if you steal my debit card, you really haven’t taken anything from me. I can also figure out where all my money went at the end of the month.

42

There’s this gas station that we go to (it’s the cheapest around) all the time. When you get gas you can use your debit or credit card at the pump, you can pay inside with your debit or credit card, and there’s an ATM (I have no idea if it’s affiliated with a bank or is just an “ATM” - I don’t know if those machines HAVE to be affiliated with a bank - do they?) that lets you get cash for a $2 fee per transaction. Of course cash is always an option as well.

If you want to pay at the pump with your card, it’s not a problem. If you want to go inside and pay with cash, no problem. If you go inside and try to pay with your debit card or credit card (rather than paying at the pump because you’re buying, say, cigarettes too) they ALWAYS say that the “lines” are down and you have to pay cash. So you have to use their ATM and incur the $2 fee.

Now, my question is - is this as fishy as it seems to me? If the “lines” were down, how come the other electronic methods of payment work (debit/credit at pump, ATM)? Don’t they use the same “lines”?

Sorry - but this has been bugging me.

43

Sorry - forgot to add - And who gets the $2 from the ATM??

44

Since when did $20 notes become “large denomination” bills? Hell, they’re less common here than $50 notes, which even people on Centrelink payments seem to have a ready supply of.

$5 notes seem to be the least common note I come across, and I’m finding more and more people paying for things with $100 notes.

Anyone who pays for a purchase of less than $50 or so using a $100 note is a cunt of the highest order. And there’s a special place in Heck for people who use $100 notes to pay for purchases under $10, and within that special place there’s a VIP section for people who pay for purchases under $10 using a $100 note first thing in the morning (ie, before there’s any change in the till). :mad:

The problem here isn’t finding places that will accept cash, it’s finding places with EFTPOS. In the city it’s usually not an issue, but the further you get from civilisation, the more likely you are to find yourself in cash or old-school zip-zap machine credit card country…

Having said that, it’s still my dream to pay for a new car or massively expensive consumer item using a briefcase full of cash, just like in some bad '80s movie. :smiley:

45

The owner of the ATM. Most of the ones you see in gas stations and convenience stores are not owned by banks, but by private businesses who place them in locations like that and get their money from the fees that they charge.

Even bank-owned ATM’s often charge a fee for users who are not customers of their bank.

And then, of course, there are the banks (like mine) who charge me an additional fee whenever I use someone else’s ATM to access my account (greedy SOB’s).

46

It’s quite possible that the store owns the ATM. And of course, even if they don’t they get a cut.

47

We* got a flat commission, monthly. Of course, some places will want to make sure they give the ATM owner a reason to keep paying that commission.

  • I used to work for a Holiday Inn, and did the bookkeeping for a bit.
48

Sounds like 7-Eleven. All the ones I’ve seen have this type of arrangement. However, I can’t say that I’ve seen it at many other places–I can’t specifically recall any others, actually. I agree that if your store has a change safe like this, then you can operate with a low drawer count, but since most places don’t, they still need to keep a sufficiently large drawer count to make change. For these places, not taking $50s and $100s doesn’t do a thing to cut losses in a robbery. In addition, robbery is a relatively rare crime for most locations, while counterfeit currency is a much larger problem. Even here, however, vigilance is a much better security measure than simply not taking large bills, particularly as the most commonly counterfeited denomination is the $20.

49

Come to think of it, employee embezzelment is an even bigger problem than robbery and counterfeiting combined, probably by an order of magnitude or more. THAT is likely the major reason for drawer skims, safe drops and even not accepting large bills (it’s easier for an employee to steal one $100 bill than to steal five $20s.)

Ok, so robbery has something to do with it–I’ll retract that bit–but, it’s hardly the major reason, IMO.

50

This can’t be true. If “statistics continue to indicate that the amount of counterfeit U.S. currency worldwide is less than one percent of genuine U.S. currency in circulation,” then that seems a whole lot less common than robberies. I’m not saying that stores don’t get the occasional counterfeit bill and fail to spot them, but I find it hard to believe that it’s more of a concern than the armed robber.

On preview, I’d like you to justify this next statement as well, please. It just comes off as even more ridiculous than the first one in this post. What are you basing this on?

51

Past experience in retail management. Most of the places I worked never got robbed even once. But, there were occassionally large, unexplained drawer shortages which were almost certainly employee theft–$20 here, $50 there; it adds up. At my Radio Shack store, we probably lost about $200 per year to employee theft, but none, zero, zip to robbery. I also recall at least a few counterfeits being caught by our bank of deposit, but I couldn’t tell you the dollar amount. Whatever it was, it was certainly greater by far than the amount we lost to robbery, which as I said was $0.

I also have no doubt that there ARE locations much more prone to robbery and very likely loose far more a year that way than through other factors, but IME these are fewer.

52

How many Radio Shacks refuse to take larger than a $50 bill? How many Radio Shacks are located in sparsely populated and sometimes dimly lit areas, staffed by a single person on a 10 PM - 6 AM shift?

I think the OP is about that sort of establishment. The gas station, the McDonalds, the 7-11. The quick-in, quick out kind of place. I don’t think its aimed so much at retail stores generally (not always, but generally) found within the relative security of a mall. In those cases, the potential for counterfeit bills may be a bit greater than average; but overall, I’d say reducing the risk of robbery and making it easier to make change on smaller purchases accounts for much mor eof the reasoning behind “No Large Bills” than counterfeitting does.

An employee skimming money will happen whether there’s $20 in the drawer, or $200. It can’t see how it has anything at all to do with the type of bill being accepted.

At the Gas and Sip on Route 9, they probably won’t take your $50 bill because been robbed at least once, and this neon yellow, hand written, probably misspelled sign may help the nervous employee feel just a little bit safer.

Maybe someone just needed some gum and it took the $48 cash in the drawer to make change. The next customer in probably ripped the cashier a new one for not being able to make proper change on a pack of smokes, and the fed up cashier scraweled the sign moments earlier.

Most of the convenient and retail stores, as well as gas stations, that I’ve seen, have that detection pen that they rub on $20s or higher to combat counterfeits. Seems to work well enough to that end.

53

That’s why I was wondering - are they using the “line is down” thing just to make money off the ATM? Like I said before, how can only the debit/credit “line” inside the store be “down”?

54

Card banker checking in. Actually, what FatBaldGuy said is absolutely true: the bank has no control whatsoever over when a check card transaction posts to your account.

Let’s say you swipe your check card for $10 at Wegman’s. The little swipey machine, (called a ZON), sends that data to the bank. If you have the required funds available, the bank sends back an authorization code and places a $10 hold on your account; this is why, if you check your balance immediately after using the card, the transaction seems to have “come out” already [editorial: in truth, I really wish banks didn’t place funds on hold; all it actually serves to do is confuse the hell out of people who think their transactions have already posted]. This leaves Wegman’s with a $10 sales draft, similar to a check, which they must then submit through their merchant bank, who returns it to your bank, who then gives the $10 to the merchant bank and posts the transaction to your account during the next business day’s processing.

Very rarely will you see a check card transaction post to the account on the same day it was made. It can happen, especially if you make the purchase early in the day, and you and the merchant use the same bank – given your statement about when your purchases posted with your old bank, I’d lay odds on which bank most of your area’s merchants use – but it generally doesn’t. More often than not, you’ll see it post during the next business day’s update, which means that, barring weekends, you’ll see it on your account two “real” days after the transaction was made. If a weekend is in the way, that adds two days to the whole shebang. So, here’s my Educated Guess™ as to what happened with the Wegman’s situation.

You swiped your card at Wegman’s on Thursday. Since, as you point out, they probably want their money ASAP, they submitted that day’s sales drafts to their bank for processing that same day. However, they did this after that bank’s cutoff time for same-day processing, which varies from bank to bank, but is generally in the 2:00-4:00 pm range. So, the merchant bank processed your sales draft on Friday night, and sent it on its merry way to your bank. Your bank, like all banks of which I’m aware, does not update anything on weekends, so their next chance to process your sales draft was Monday night. Tuesday, you have a look at your account, and there’s the transaction. To you, five days seems like an outrageously long time to process this very basic transaction, but in reality, there was nothing at all your bank could have done to speed up this process. There are many legitimate reasons to be pissed off at banks, but this isn’t one of them.

All of the above, of course, assumes that by “debit transaction”, you’re referring to a purchase made with a check card using the credit option. If you actually made the purchase as a debit, by entering your PIN, then you’re absolutely right; the absolute latest that should have been processed would have been Friday night. I’ll have to check my Book-O-Regs, but I’m almost positive that delaying it any longer would be illegal if this were the case.

55

It’s the amount they have access to. An employee who only has access to $20 is more likely to take a smaller amount of it than if they had access to $200. Right?

Those pens are almost as useless as the counterfeit bills they’re meant to detect, from what I’ve read. It’s just iodine that reacts to the starch in ordinary paper. Counterfeiters learned long ago how to get around that.

It would help if someone could find a table with some relevant statistics. I’ve looked but can’t find anything suitable online. Yay, a trip to the library! You can’t really use the figures you dug up because they’re about different things. One is percent of bills which are counterfeit and the other is the number of various crimes per capita. You can’t necessarily compare the two.

56

Sure it does. A smaller amout is also more easily explained away, less likely to cost me my job, and adds up just the same over time. Right?

Losing $200 a year to theft is not really that big of deal in the big picture. That’s less than 60¢ a day. How many tills do you have running per day? 3? Four? How many staff in those tills? IME, most stores give you about a 25¢ grace on shortages. This grace allowance easily accounts for $200 a year.

57

Well, that was my store. I kept on top of things and made sure my people were following established cash-handling procedures. I’ve no doubt other, larger stores lose much more, especially when they get lax with cash-handling and managers stop being vigilant. My point was that it was significantly more than the amount we lost to robbery. That’s all. It wasn’t meant to represent an average; I’ve no idea what it is.

58

It’s doubtful but possible. One could run off the phone line,t he other the cable line. But :dubious: especially as you have said they use this excuse a lot. Ask them, see what they say?

59

Who trained your employees? Obviously someone with no imagination.

The first time I was trained on a register, I was told:

“Never take a $10 or a $20 from the register. It’s a dead giveaway. Instead, take $32.56 and they’ll never figure it out.”

And no, I never did.

60

Which has very little to do with whether or not your store accepts or does not accept $50 bills or larger. It’s not the bill being handled, it’s the Bill who’s handling it, if you follow me. My point is that till tapping happens whether or not you accept large denominations, and is not the reason behind the policy not to accept them.