Other than the already mentioned cannabis dispensaries, I cannot think of any cash only businesses in Philly. The law does not require any business to be cash only. It simply requires that any business accept cash in addition to any other forms of payment it accepts.
Also, I call false equivalency. If you have credit, you can get cash. You may have to go somewhere else, spend some time and pay a fee. But, you can certainly obtain cash. OTOH it is entirely possible to have cash and be unable to get credit. As I and the city council have said, forcing businesses to accept cash prevents class discrimination. Passing a law forcing businesses to accept credit would serve what purpose exactly?
I know of several ATM’s I can walk to. None of them are the bank I actually have an account with, so I avoid using them due to the ‘not your bank’ fee. I don’t know of any place in my neighborhood to get a reloadable debit card. They may have them at the weird (and overpriced!) Target I take the trolley to in order to buy groceries not found in my neighborhood. I honestly don’t know. I haven’t seen them. I also have not asked if they have any. So, at least in my neighborhood it is much easier to get cash with credit than the reverse.
I also have no idea how a reloadable debit card works in practice. Where do you go to buy one? How do you initially load money on to the card? How do you load more money on to it? Do you need a minimum balance? What fees are involved exactly?
Also, we were talking about credit not debit. Before anybody objects, yes for most purposes the two are interchangable. This not true for all uses. OTTOMH, paying my rent through the online portal using a credit card incurrs a smaller charge than if I use a debit card. Do Amazon cashless stores take both credit and debit? I honesty don’t know.
My monthly rent is $950. If we round that up to an even thousand to make the math easier, it looks like the credit card fee is about twice the debit fee.
However, we can clearly see that at least in this case, there is a definite difference between a credit card and a debit card.
I would think they would be available pretty much anywhere that has a section displaying various gift cards like for Amazon or iTunes. You take the card to the counter and give the casheer the cash that you want loaded onto the card.
You need a Social Security number. This leaves out undocumented immigrants. Philadelphia is officially a sanctuary city. So, that seems likely to come up.
You need an address. As was mentioned, we have a lot of homeless people. This leaves them out.
I just glanced at the first card described, I see “fees may apply” but not a listing of how much each fee is and when it applies.
The most memorable times in the past 10 years or so that I’ve used cash also involved gambling. On my recent christmas vacation, I bought scratch off lottery tickets for my Mom, who likes them, and all lottery tickets that I’ve seen are cash only, because otherwise petty thieves could use it as an expensive way to empty a credit card quickly: buy a bunch of tickets with the credit card and then return the winners for untraceable cash.
A few years before that, I had won big at poker and for a month or so it was more convenient to pay for my groceries and some other stuff than to deposit it at a bank, especially since I knew that I’d eventually lose it again and have to make a withdrawal! However, I did get my payout mostly in “benjamins”, so my wallet was merely completely full, rather than comically bulging.
I agree that not taking cash is discriminatory. There was an article in the NYT or WaPo the other day saying how people who can’t afford/don’t know how to use smart phones (the homeless and the elderly, mostly) are being left out of a lot of opportunities to make inexpensive purchases, now that everyone uses their smart phone to pay for everything.
We used to pay our housecleaner by check or bank transfer, but about a year ago she went cash-only as her financial circumstances are pretty dire.
If you need to have $10,000 on you at all times because you are a gambler and never know when you might run into a game of poker, that’s one thing, but most people do not need that much on a regular basis.
As of October 2023, 70 percent of US consumers made a mobile payment at least once in the prior 12 months. In addition, 29 percent of payments made by US consumers used a mobile device; five years earlier in 2018, just 8 percent of consumer payments were executed via mobile.
It mentions new public toilets in DC that you can only pay for by smart phone:
The gleaming blue booths popped up this year in busy urban spaces such as Dupont Circle, Columbia Heights and downtown D.C., providing convenient, clean and free toilets for people who find themselves in urgent need.
Which is a blessed relief — except for those who don’t carry phones, a group particularly populated by old folks, the homeless and the poor. To get into one of about a dozen freestanding Throne bathrooms in the District and certain suburbs, you need to unlock the door with either a QR code or a text sent to the company.
and how old fashioned methods of advertising deals are disappearing:
Too often now, in matters meaningful and meaningless, the good stuff is reserved for people who have smartphones or other digital tools. From parking garages to airplane movie offerings, it pays to be digitally equipped. More to the point, it hurts to be in the technological slow lane.
(Apologies if the article is paywalled; I looked for some kind of gift link mechanism and didn’t find one.)
As a former retail cashier, I can positively state that bra/sock cash is utterly disgusting. Warm and damp with a stranger’s sweat? EEEEWWWW. Also, if you’re only buying a few dollars’ worth of goods in a thrift store, please do NOT haul out the Benjys to show off. We have only so much change in the STORE, let alone in an individual register (for security reasons, extra cash beyond daily change needs gets deposited in the bank ASAP). One or two customers treating us as a bank, we can cope with, but if you’re the fourth or fifth person who’s done this at the same register…
Can confirm. About ten years ago, I was a lead cashier in a thrift store (mid-40s at that time). On several occasions, my younger co-workers would call me over for things like $2 bills or old-style Kennedy dollar coins. Since the kids (OK, so far as I know they were all legal adults, but a lot of them were young enough I could have given birth to them) had never seen such things before, there was some bewilderment. As far as some place in the register, $2s joined $50s and $100s under the drawer’s divider unit, and ours did have a coin slot not in use for the typical quarters and down, so that was where half-dollars and dollar coins wound up.