Ironically I just got a haircut at a barbershop that only takes cash, and it isn’t the only one.
Decades ago, my father landed at JFK Airport where the self-service luggage cart dispenser only took cash; I think $1.50 in quarters. He gave another passenger the money.
“Why would you object if you have nothing to hide?” is not considered a good argument in multiple contexts.
Actually I’m seeing more and more places tack on a card surcharge even for debit cards. If a cashless society was mandated businesses would demand laws making card transactions free.
This seems to be a “remote payment” problem, not a “cashless” problem. In other words, it’s not an issue if you are buying something in person. But - these sort of “how much can you afford to pay" issues are already common (auto and home purchases, for example), and really have nothing to do with how you pay.
Agree. At the same time, evildoers are as lazy as good guys. If we adopt systems that happen as a side effect to make evil easier, we ought not be surprised to find evil growing.
I recall when UPC barcodes were first added to grocery items. The store industry was overjoyed at the idea of not having to adhere paper price tags to each can of beans; think of the labor savings! The consumer watchdogs were horrified that each can of beans could be priced differently and customers would have no way to know the total cost of their cart before they hit the cash registers.
The federally mandated compromise, which the stores fought tooth and nail, was to have paper shelf tags showing the price of each item. And if an item rang up differently and the customer protested, the shelf tag price would rule. Which led to a generation of eagle-eyed mostly old mostly ladies watching that register like a hawk.
Nowadays of course they have electronic shelf tags that could, but probably don’t, adjust the price displayed depending on who is standing there looking at them. How handy that each of us now carries an identity beacon wherever we go that anyone / anything can interrogate.
Modern e-based commerce is just more of the same. “Frictionless” cuts both ways.
I have the Safeway supermarket app on my phone and receive the weekly ad online. There are some offers available to everyone and others that are “Just for U”, meaning aimed specifically at me. Some are for things I regularly buy, while other offers are for things they think I might like to buy. So offers like these are a way they can target prices at particular customers.
I was curious about this and did some searching.
It looks like it is free, for both the user and the retailer, to use a QR pay app from a Thai bank. The transaction clears immediately so there’s no credit being extended. Similar to Zelle in the US. There might be fees for larger transactions – I saw 0.5% which is pretty modest.
There are other ways to do QR pay (there are a lot of apps). If you are a tourist or an expat without a Thai bank account, you can back it with a credit card or prepay. These seemed to have the higher fees of ~3%. There’s some other service that used to be free, but are now charging fees. I didn’t dig in because I really only cared about the cost for locals.
Singapore looks similar. There are small fees, but the government was subsidizing then until recently.
I think the This system is how WeChat works in PRC. No fees for small transactions backed by a bank. Not sure about AliPay.
AFAIK, always ZERO at both ends. The same App is used for person-to-person.
Many vendors are individuals. (The “merchant” name appears when you pay.)
My dentist gives a discount if you pay with banknotes. My daughter explains that’s
to evade taxation! (I’d forgotten this when I posted earlier.)
IMO this is a fundamentally out of date, mistaken, way of thinking. Sure this was the case when it took an actual human looking for a bit of paper in a filing cabinet, or even when it took actually typing each name in a query form. But nowadays the dataset of every single financial transaction of any size in the whole country is not considered particularly large. It’s completely feasible for either corporations or government analyse every last trip to piggly wiggly for their own ends.
In fact i am sure it’s being done, and not by good actors either. E.g. I would shocked if it wasn’t included in some of the dodgy AI tools the scumbags at Palantir are providing to ICE and all manner of other sketchy organizations and governments (and the UK government).
Two things. First, here we have another significant difference between the US and other first-world democracies. The US government seems to have the ability to extract personal data from any organization for any reason, whereas other countries have much stronger privacy laws. This is why when some company that purports to be local to your country collects personal data of any kind, it’s always a huge concern if their data centers are US-based.
The other point is that the ability to automatically scan massive volumes of data looking for patterns does not preclude the problem of massive numbers of false positives. It tends to work fairly well most of the time in the realm of fraud detection because there are historically well-known signals that are fairly easy to detect, and the action it triggers is simply to block the card. Scanning huge databases for “might be doing something illegal” is much more nebulous and much more subject to error, and any action taken is much more labour-intensive.
The entire founding mission of the National Security Agency (NSA) is to be able to access any electronic data on the planet; they’ve largely succeeded.
What!?! LOL. Have you heard of GCHQ?
I’m not going to hold up the US as a paragon of virtue when it comes to protecting the privacy of its citizens (particularly post 9/11) but compared to the UK and others it is.
Not entirely. Actually one of the main services GCHQ provides to NSA, et al, is doing things that wound be unconstitutional for the “three letter agencies” to do, but the UK has no problem with
No, the UK has a big problem with it. GCHQ was censured more than 10 years ago by the British Investigatory Powers Tribunal, and has since modified its practices. Among the complaints against it was the opaqe and secretive way it shared information with US agencies, which remain the single biggest threat to privacy in the world. And now there’s a lawless regime in Washington that commits a dozen constitutional violations every day before breakfast, and FISA violations were rampant even before that.
My guess is that it’s in the interests of the Thai government to cover the actual cost of the phone payment app, because tax evasion is difficult with such transactions.
It has such a problem with it that it gave them a stern telling off!
Lol yes this completely secret body (whose practices were only found out because they were leaked on the US side by Snowden) has I’m sure completely changed its practices because they got told off very slightly (once and only once in the decades they were being “overseen”)
Only if humans have to go through all those positives. Which they don’t, it’s trivial to get the computer to reduce those most egregious noncompliant agitators.
The main QR payment apps are bank apps so the transaction is going from bank account to bank account. There are no transaction fees because the transaction is immediately completed end-to-end and no credit is extended. The banks pick up the overhead of the network transaction costs. This is how Zelle works in the US – it is an app and network owned and operated by the majority of US banks.
As I mentioned up-thread the Singapore government was subsidizing transaction fees, but stopped recently.
Since this has evolved into just complaints about cashless payments, I’d say it’s just:
- Difficult to give small payments to buskers / charities / homeless (although this depends on what payment systems are common in a particular country. In china, where app + QR code is the standard way of paying for things it is pretty common for beggars or street vendors to have a QR code for receiving payment)
- Bigger risk of overpaying. e.g. I went to a petrol station to buy a snack and the display said £55 (~$75). Luckily I spotted it and the store worker apologised, but it made me wonder how many times that might have happened and I didn’t notice. Not all payment machine things even show the value.
However, I of course prefer cashless overall. The list of drawbacks of using cash would be a much longer list.
If we go cashless - and I only rarely use cash - my (young) children will suffer.
They only use cash for arcade games and stupid “grabber” games, but by using coins, I get to ration their spending.
Otherwise my credit card dept would balloon on every outing!
I actually like using cash, even though it is mostly paper. The ritual of “go to ATM machine, withdraw money, pay for groceries” feels like “I am losing money but gaining goods”, whereas using my card is more akin to magic.