New York is considering banning the practise of having “cashless” businesses - where you can only pay for your goods by some sort of card.
The article points out that this practise excludes a whole swathe of poor and more vulnerable people, who may not own cards or bank accounts.
I am pretty sympathetic to this argument. At the moment, “cashless” businesses tend to be those which cater to wealthier members of the community, but at what point does this become a significant burden on non-card-owning people? 10% of businesses? 50%?
There’s also the fact that card purchases are trackable in a way that cash purchases are not, and there are privacy implications in pushing the population onto a payment method that links every item you’ve ever bought back to you via your card data. But maybe people who already do most of their shopping by cards/online don’t feel like that.
So what do you say? Good idea or not? Ought we to insist as societies that cash is still available as a universally useable thing?
Cash can be expensive. It has to be counted. It has to be taken to the bank. It can be stolen. And so. on. There are business owners on the Dope who can give you chapter and verse. But cash is legal tender - the common currency of the State - so businesses should not be able to refuse it and I’m surprised that such businesses are actually legal.
The universality of cash business reduces the amount of power that the credit card companies have. If the credit card companies get out of line, a business can always refuse to take them, and people use cash. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with a society where American Express and Mastercard control every transaction.
Not that a few businesses alone are going get us to that point, but if it takes off, it’s a trend that could be worrisome. There’s something very comfortable about the dependability of cold hard anonymous cash.
I believe that in most jurisdictions the concept of “legal tender” applies (if at all) only to existing debts. If a business has a policy of (say) refusing to change $100 bills or to accept payment in pennies, that’s fine - because no contract/debt yet exists.
Here in Melbourne (Aus), I’ve been to a couple of festivals, fetes etc, consisting of businesses running a pop-up store consisting of a tent or gazebo or some such temporary structure. There have been signs saying ‘No cash accepted’. Every store accepts only electronic, card-only transactions. That seems a very sensible situation considering the security concerns at on open-air, relatively non-secure environment.
Au contraire mon ami. It is perfectly possible to operate a cashless economy. Though, some people (and some people in positions of power) may balk at this notion. (At the outset it must be said any curb on credit card company power can be managed by legislating interest rates.) In fact, the ideal of digital reality is to convert all commerce to electronic transactions. Value is accrued and accounted for digitally in an account. Debit is withdrawn from one account and another account is increased correspondingly. The entire economy could be cashless. Perhaps it should be.
I’ll pose you one further. The existence of money at all in an economy can be shed. If everyone continues to do what they do; goods are manufactured and distributed, people go in take what they need, theft would have no incentive. Resale of something readily obtainable is ludicrous. Having no cash to complete a transaction speaks for itself. Hoarding money and calling it wealth would disappear as well.
Oh, capitalists will say, you need money or people will just stop doing what they do. Money is the incentive. Sure, some jobs people would only do if you pay them might even disappear. But, to claim humans need an artificial stimulus (provided by the big guys on top) or we’ll just sit down and pick lint from our belly buttons for sixty years takes hubris to a dizzying height. Of course, capitalists make all sorts of such claims to keep humans manning their own wealth generating machine.
Without money humans would ignore the qualities they possess due to evolution. Right? Humans would just stop and loll their tongues about, eyes rolling aimlessly, walking into walls - without bank notes. Riiiiiight.
they all ready do … I can get my ssa on a government issued prepaid visa bank card which has to be accepted even if you don’t take credit cards
In ca they do the same for the cash/food aid although you can take the cash off the card at an atm …. but one day soon you probably wont be able to
Theres even cards that if your employer does direct deposit they can put your paycheck on a prepaid card just like the ssa one mentioned above
So the law cant really use poor people on benefits as an excuse as were well covered
Don’t all of those take ridiculous amounts for withdrawals?
I know the employer ones are bad fees out the wazoo when my little brother worked at checkers 20 percent of his pay could be gone in fees even being careful about it
Legal tender can’t be refused in settlement of a debt. But businesses that don’t extend credit aren’t affected by this. If you want to buy coffee or a newspaper or whatever from me and I indicate that I don’t accept cash but am happy to take plastic, that’s fine, legally speaking. There is no debt involved there.
If that’s the case, it seems to me that the best solution is to make fee-free “plastic cash” available to everyone who might otherwise be excluded by a cash-free system.
We operate a small business, and the cash we get drops every year. It’s gone from 50%+ to less than 10%. Checks are decreasing also. A lot of days, it’s 100% credit. Once in awhile, a debit card. Cash usually comes from older folks. Some use plastic to pay, but tip in cash. Not often. I frequent a small restaurant, they used to be cash only, but he finally started accepting credit a few years ago. You really have too, most folks don’t carry much cash anymore.
What is the transaction fee charged these days to merchants who accept credit cards? For debit cards? Is that fee really significant less than the cost to the merchant of handling cash?
… (As for the communist utopia envisioned by John Lennon, I don’t think cash per se is the obstacle to that. Without cash, people would still want to trade their efforts for gold, silver, iPhones, or sex.)