I do use cash for many small transactions. I don’t like that the banks collect funds on top of what small retailers would like for their product. Shopping at the farm market, art fairs, food trucks, and occasional fast food is done with cash. My hair salon charges extra for credit or debit. As a former waitress, I tip with cash on the American side of the pond.
I can feel free to donate cash to a busker or beggar when possible. They won’t be able to trace me or my donation. Like ThelmaLou, I know what it’s like to be truly skint and desperate. So, if my bills are paid, I might hand over a tenner. Times are tough right now.
Maybe in an environment where contactless tap cards aren’t as ubiquitous as they are here in Canada. But nothing can be faster than just touching a card to a payment terminal – that’s all there is to it. It’s become by far my favourite form of payment. It’s really about as close as you can come to not worrying about payment at all. It’s just instant. If you don’t need a receipt, you don’t even need to wait for it to be printed – hold your card to the terminal and then literally just walk away when it beeps its cheerful acknowledgment.
I don’t think it’s a matter of the contactless cards themselves - all my cards are contactless as far as I know. It’s the terminals. Chain stores usually have contactless terminals , but that doesn’t mean that small independent stores have upgraded. Lots of them haven’t, so if I want to pay for my coffee with a card at the local bodega, I’m going to have to enter my pin at least - or maybe even wait to sign the pad or a printed receipt if I use a credit card.
That’s part of the ubiquity too though. Even tiny independent local shops in England have them now, and since covid all the cafes and coffee shops do too. Or they accept Google/Apple pay. Most ordinary market stalls are still cash-only, but at the posh farmers’ markets even some of them take cards or phone payments, always contactless.
They’re a lot cheaper to buy and run than they used to be - at least, in England, the EU, and presumably Canada and other places.
Here is Aus. even market stall owners accept contactless payment often with an app on their smartphone and since everybody has a smartphone these days, I guess it’s no extra cost (at least for the payment unit)
I think for a lot of professionally run shops, the costs associated with accepting cards are at least offset by the costs associated with not having to deal with cash. I guess for a small family run business where the cash just disappears straight into the owner’s pocket it’s different but for a professionally run business there is a cost associated with dealing with cash in volume.
There is a great kebab place near me run by a Lebanese family. It is famous for being absolutely extraordinary cheap but nonetheless tasty. They are cash only. I think it is going to start hurting them. There has been a couple of occasions recently where I have thought we should go there but then realised it would involve an extra trip to a cash machine, and decided to go to one of the neighbouring establishments instead.
I have no doubt they don’t pay their fair share of tax. That might be one of the reasons they can be so cheap.
I have the impression that covid relief last year, based on reported income, hit a lot of small businesses and small traders hard, if they were under-declaring their income. I wonder if some of them realised that, actually, they might not be paying that much tax anyway - for market stall owners especially, their earnings are often really low anyway (sometimes really, really low), and going legit doesn’t actually cost them as much as they thought.
For Australia, GST killed a lot of income under-declaration because of the way it is passed through the supply chain. You only effectively pay GST if you are the last person in the chain ie it is supposed to be a tax only on the consumer. If your inputs attract GST (and they do) then you can recover that through the GST on your outputs. But if you don’t declare your income from your outputs, you are the one left standing when the music stops.
I’m painting with a wide brush here, but there’s definitely more than a few small businesses in the USA who underreport also for ideological reasons. They have a pathological hatred of ‘big government’ and thus want to turn over as little as possible.