Must be different where you are. I haven’t had a store discourage card use for a purchase of any size (including, in a few cases, <$1*) in years. The only times they’ve not taken cards is because the card validation process was down.
*Only a few because I almost always have cash on me **. Those few times, I didn’t.
**And normally, I’d just hand over a dollar and dump the change in the jar when I got home. Every so often I roll it and either take it to the credit union or a CoinStar where I get an Amazon gift card. So if there’s a coin shortage, I’ll take my share of the blame. I probably have $200+ in a drawer right now.
No idea; contactless payment is so endemic here in Australia that I haven’t handled cash of any kind in yonks. No one objects to even small purchases by card; in fact, most places are encouraging it to lessen the risk of transmission. Fraud is not a concern.
I haven’t seen that in a long time, AFAIR the credit card charges for small purchases went away as more and more small vendors are moving to cards. Definitely every coffee shop and grocery store that I’ve been to in the past five years has been happy to take a card for any purchase. I would think this would be even more true in a large city, where things are generally more expensive. Do you actually see people, especially people under 60 and really especially people under 40, counting out change for purchases in big cities? I didn’t see that often 25 years ago, and I can’t imagine that change usage has gone up that much.
Debit card fraud doesn’t seem to be a big worry for a lot of people, while I use a credit card for the job my debit card has the same fraud protection as my credit card (and has for at least a decade) so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Do you actually see people, especially people under 60 and really especially people under 40, counting out change for purchases in big cities? I didn’t see that often 25 years ago, and I can’t imagine that change usage has gone up that much.
Although I still see people counting out change sometimes, what I see more often is people paying in cash. Cash only stores exist - mostly a particular type of store that I don’t often see outside of cities. They sell newspapers, cigarettes, lottery tickets, soda and snacks. Maybe coffee. But they aren’t convenience stores ( they don’t even sell bread and milk), they’re more like a newsstand although some of them are in their own building rather than in a lobby or train station or on the street.
Many small independent convenience stores and take out places in NYC have handwritten signs that credit card purchases must be over a certain amount. Every tiny Chinese restaurant I’ve been to seems to have a “Credit Card $10+” sign.
Or I should say, this was the case earlier in the year. I have no idea if they have now taken that restriction away in response to the pandemic since I have not been to any recently.
Pre-pandemic SF Bay area, it was fairly common for a lot of hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurants not to take credit cards. A ramen joint I like on Castro Street in Mountain View, for instance. A common perception is that they’re doing that to avoid the paper trail on credit purchases to make shaving their income on their taxes easier.
Interesting, I don’t see that around me much at all anymore. Do the places, especially take out places, have their prices set so that you’re always paying with dollars and quarters, or do you fiddle around to amounts like $8.17?
Well, in a restaurant, you don’t fiddle around. You just leave an amount in whole dollars that covers the tip plus leftover change, or pay with a large bill, and take the appropriate amount of folding money out of the change to leave a reasonable tip.
Honestly I don’t really remember because it’s simply never been a big deal. If it was $8.17 I’d just give $8.25 and get change. I think some places would round up or down a couple cents, but I really never gave it much more than a few seconds of thought. Any change I got at one place would stay in my pocket until it was spent at another, and so on.
Cash-only takeout places have prices similar to fast-food restaurants - so that prices typically end in a zero or five and you might end up paying $8.17 if they add the tax separately. The cash-only almost convenience stores I mentioned price items so that only quarters are necessary - coffee is 75 cents, never 80. A bottle of water is $1.00 and when the price goes up it will be $1.25. These places never add the tax separately. They may or may not be paying the tax - I’ve seen a fair amount of concessions at stadiums and theme parks that list prices like this : "small soda .092 + .08 tax = $1.00 " or "small fries $1.33 +.17 tax +$1.50 " They are presumably remitting the tax, but don’t have to deal with anything smaller than a quarter so it’s possible the stores are setting prices the same way.
I’d probably carry coins around me in America both if some of them had real value and I customarily carried a backpack. I don’t like carrying loads of coins in my pants and worrying about them falling out.
But, if your coins are in your backpack would you really see yourself unshouldering it every time you need to use some coins to pay for something? Then you’d have unzip it, fish around for the needed coins, and so on.
The whole idea of having coins with meaningful, usable denominations is that you don’t accumulate loads of them in your pants, because you can easily spend them. Does your wallet fill up to bursting with five dollar bills? Most likely that doesn’t happen because five dollar bills have useful value.
One thing I love about the SDMB is that one can be sure that on a thread about favorite TV shows, several people will post to say they never watch TV. And here on a thread about coin shortages, of course people post about never using cash/coins.
Of the Swiss coins in this photo, the 5Fr piece is the size of a half dollar–and at today’s exchange rate, worth ELEVEN times as much. That’s something to think about the next time you pay Coinstar twelve cents on the dollar to turn your coins into “cash”, or spend an hour at the kitchen table rolling up all those pennies and nickels you’ve been accumulating.
Usable coinage is just another one of those nice things we can’t have here, because of all the idiots who believe they’ll be robbed at the checkstand if we do away with pennies, or that they’ll need to wear medieval style coin purses if we eliminate dollar bills.
As to non-users of coins posting their point can be summarized as:
I can’t be contributing to the shortage. Most people I know are like me. So to the degree there really is a shortage, it must be caused by a small percentage of Americans doing something very differently than they used to.
FWIW the Winco Foods grocery chain refuses credit cards, saying it costs them money which they would rather not pass on to their customers. They do accept debit cards, though.
It’s true, CC cost like 2%. However, cash costs like about 1% and checks even more.
Study after study has shown that unless your average sale is quite small, business is increased so much by cards that the extra expense is well negated by the extra profits.
In Canada, Interac debit cards charge a flat fee per transaction (IIRC ten cents), rather than a percentage plus a flat fee, as the credit cards do. Merchants love this. Every now and then, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business mounts a campaign to encourage consumers to use debit cards more often.
I’m sure I’m not the only one, but here’s why I need coins. Instead of just using my card and paper money.
The laundromat I go to doesn’t have e-pay. Nor dollar payments for the machines. But a wash cycle is $1.75 or $2.25. Need coins.
The dryer is timed at 7 minutes for $.25. I always pay for the 28 minutes. But, again, quarters only.
Now this is just one example of why coins are needed. Imagine the cost to the owner to convert all those machines to take plastic. Plus the cost to process credit/debit payments. Then extrapolate that to every laundromat in the county (US). Think they’ll eat the cost?
Now really think of how many situations like that in all phases of life a single country of 340,000,000 million that entails.
I’d love to just swipe a card for every single thing I ever buy. From gas to a beer to a game of darts. But I have to be honest. I’m much more likely to throw a few coins into a charity bin walking out of a store than pull out my credit card and sign.
And finally. Fuck pennies. We really do need to get rid of that shit.
Side question: I’ve always wondered the difference between quid, shillings, pence, etc. I know some are lingo/slang but really want to know. Thanks
