Me: “in most countries, cops taking people’s money without a judge’s orders to do so would be considered armed robbery.”
You: “bills say they are legal tender therefore people have to accept them!”
I really don’t see the relationship between robbery by cop and the bills of the country where robbery by cop is considered legal having a specific sentence printed on them. Maybe should go get coffee. goes in search of coffee
Cash isn’t infallible - it just has different failure modes to electronic payment.
Can you describe any cash ‘failure modes’? I, for one, am curious what that refers to.
Cash has the advantage of anonymity, and in an age when almost your every move can be tracked, I think cash will always have a place.
How you gonna buy weed/cocaine/opioids, etc, with a cc or debit card? And every politician taking money for influence? Are they gonna take cheques? Yeah, I know, bitcoin etc, but I don’t think they will ever entirely wipe out cash.
Without cash I think there will be a (constantly escalating) banking fee attached to every purchase, bill payment, transfer, cc, debit card transaction. And if you think the banks can be trusted to not gouge consumers and use such fees as an additional income stream, well then, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.
It will be interesting to see how this develops, in future. But I, for one, like using cash and hope it does not disappear any time soon.
Re: Civil forfeiture and non-cash.
Cops can now drain things like pre-paid debit cards at the side of the road. “You have $200 on a card? Obviously a drug dealer, we’re going to take it. And it’s going to cost a lot more than $200 to get it back. Have a nice day.”
Sure:
[ul]
[li]You forget to take it with you[/li][li]You don’t have sufficient cash on your person for the item (even though you could afford it with funds you have in the bank)[/li][li]Your cash is stolen or lost[/li][li]Your cash is refused by the vendor on the grounds they suspect it is forged (doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong)[/li][li]The vendor declines the sale because they cannot make change for your transaction[/li][/ul]
Of course, those failure modes have different root causes and owners to the ways in which electronic payment systems may fail, but my point is this; the statement “cash is a payment system which always works” is a false one. It is not infallible - it’s perfectly capable of failing in ways that are just not necessarily the same as electronic payment.
Furthermore, the concern regarding the fallibility of electronic payments just seems like an invented worry to me. I’ve paid cash for goods maybe three or four times in the last year (and I can’t remember what the last of those was - it was months ago) - the last time I handled cash was to give a tenner to my son, who paid it into his bank the next day (and I only gave him cash because someone gave me cash).
I spend money multiple times every day, but never in the form of cash, and it never seems to be a problem.
And you don’t think they could do that if it was a roll of banknotes?
Ok, but outside of, “forgot to take it”, and, “it was lost or stolen”, which, of course also applies to debit/cc, (yes, you are not out money when you lose your debit/cc, but You still cannot purchase what you need, in that moment.)
I have never experienced any of the failures you’ve quoted in using cash for over 50 yrs.
Not saying it doesn’t EVER happen, but it’s much, MUCH rarer, in my experience, than not being able to purchase/pay because the power/Internet is down.
There is no ‘outside of’ - those are failure modes of cash. they happen to be scenarios where you, the cash owner, have some control, but that’s just a detail - they’re situations in which you return home without having bought the thing you wanted.
<shrug> I can’t remember experiencing a failure of an electronic transaction - it just doesn’t happen enough to be worried about. My card broke once because I tried to scrape ice off the car windscreen. I guess that counts.
Doesn’t matter. The assertion was “cash is a payment system which always works” - which is false.
If electronic payment methods are unreliable where you live, it’s not because it has to be that way. It isn’t that way here.
You seem to have the idea that handling cash has no costs. The vendors who are going cashless aren’t generally doing so because of intense customer pressure, affectation or a bad business model, they’re doing so because cash transactions are starting to cost them more.
Depending on the location and time that cost might be:
And that’s not even taking into account society’s cost of having a cash system. The US spends around 450 million dollars per year on producing pennies alone. (9 billion new pennies at about 1.5 cents per penny in production costs.) And even though the mint makes money on the other coins produced, it’s not like the remaining 1 penny per penny production cost, and the cost for the higher denomination coins and bills, aren’t a socioeconomic cost either. It’s just that the cost doesn’t come directly from a government entity.
I apologize for misinterpreting that statement.
I don’t disagree. I used the misinterpreted statement as a starting point for explaining why it is less of a problem in Norway (and presumably Sweden), but I clearly stated at the end that there are problems with going cashless.
Where in “That doesn’t mean there aren’t real problems with going completely cashless, but the people who’ll have trouble are so few the PTB are more likely to work on ways to get them into the banking system than to keep the system of cash going.” am I conveniently ignoring that there are issues?
That seems plausible for “socialist paradises” Norway and Sweden. Personally I think it more likely we’ll see some sort of electronic wallet popping up. Electronic cash not requiring a registered bank account but integrated with the banking system. And what do you know, that is also suggested as a future development in the article.
According to the article Sweden’s main worry isn’t that cash is disappearing, but that it is disappearing “too fast”. Cash is going to be around a while, but I think even the Swedish government isn’t going to be able to prevent the dismantling of the publicly owned cash handling infrastructure.
As an aside, some parts of Norway’s cash handling infrastructure is already vulnerable to widespread power outage. Although almost every grocery store still accepts cash, their cash registers are computerized lock boxes that slurps up bills and coins like a vending machine and only dispenses change according to the numbers entered. Makes robberies very difficult, but makes it difficult to make change if the power goes out.
When you forget your cc/debit or lose them, you are just as inconvenienced, as you go home without your purchase. So that seems a wash, cash or credit, when it comes to purchasing. Shrug.
You don’t get power outages in England? Huh. Because the last time there was a three day outage here, people couldn’t put gas in their cars or buy anything… unless they had cash. While it’s rare for outages to last past a hour, it has happened. And, of course, can happen again. Everyone that lived through it learned something about electronic payments.
So what’s your plan if the power goes off for a day or more? Or do you believe that can’t/won’t ever happen where you are?
…Aren’t the pumps electric?
It’s extremely unlikely. England’s weather (in fact, that of most of Europe) is much more moderate than that of North America. Snowfalls which are routine for Canada and half the USA would be Armaggedon over here - but they don’t happen. I worked for Iberdrola’s subsidiary in the UK at the time they bought their first big stake in the US and the people at Home Office were freaking out over how thin and fragile the network in the US was. We’re used to much higher population densities and therefore to much higher network densities.
Sure, but that was my point; it’s not a case of replacing something perfect with something imperfect; neither is or ever can be perfect - what matters is whether it can be made acceptably good (which I am happy to argue is abundantly the case with electronic transactions where I live. This is not theory for me - it’s the way I already live.
Please note that I didn’t say we should abolish cash - my argument has only been that cash is not infallible.
Cash is probably the solution to such an emergency as you describe, if the store owners will even let people in the store when the power is off (which I suspect they will not, in this country, due to health and safety policies)
The closest situation I have seen to the one you described is where a supermarket chain upgraded their EPOS; the upgrade went badly and they could not take payments.
They couldn’t scan the products to get the prices either, or open the till drawers to put in cash or make change, so cash wasn’t a viable solution.
They allowed customers to estimate/negotiate the price of the shopping they had gathered up - and I believe that instead of taking payment, they got customers to provide their full address details and promise to come back and pay later. I imagine many gave false details and walked away with free shopping.
This mis-represents the meaning of that phrase. As has been long-established in the US, a private person does not have to accept cash in payment of a merchant transaction. Such a transaction is not a “debt”.
The store I’m in “solves” that problem by having its own emergency generators. They can either power the whole store, or just selected areas. I’ve been in the store when the system switches over in a bad storm, it’s a blink-and-you-missed-it type of transition. We sometimes stop being able to process card transactions, and we have to change how we process checks slightly, but the cash transactions keep rolling along without interruption.
About 1/3 of our transactions on an average day are still in cash. I don’t foresee us giving it up any time soon, but then, we’re after a broad customer base. That may not be so critical for a small coffeehouse.
I bet banking’s been all kinds of fun in Puerto Rico for the past few months. Look, I’m not a crank and I have a debit card and a bank account and I use online banking to pay my bills because it’s easier. I’m also in a business which has a very high percentage of cash transactions and it’s become clear to me that both sides have an advantage. I’m not comfortable with being tracked through every transaction I make–I don’t think anyone, not the government and most certainly not marketing departments of corporations, needs to know every detail of my day to day existence. Where I go, what I do and what I buy is not something any other entity is entitled to have and yet using only electronic transfers of money means that information IS out there and it IS being marketed without my knowledge or consent–my opinion is that my data should be mine and any payment for that data should come to me.
Yes, cash can also be confiscated but you know what? You’ll have to come out and FIND IT before you can grab it, and I’m pretty sure I know better than anyone else where I might or might not have cash stashes. No fucker sitting in front of a computer thousands of miles away can make it so I can’t pay my bills–at least they’re gonna have to work for it, and that is what is called a deterrent and it works. If you have the choice of being a bunny or being a hedgehog, pick the hedgie. They both might get eaten by a suitably motivated predator but one is more trouble than the other and after eating the bunny the predator might just decide to pass on the one that hurts when you eat it. Also known as the “I only have to run faster than the next guy, not faster than the bear” principle.
Also, I’m not responsible for idiotic cash decisions like making pennies and dollar bills–take that shit up with Congress. That’s an aberration and I think we all know it.