I’m not sure what you mean “doesn’t work” at jewelry stores anymore - do you mean they don’t keep certain sales off the books (cash or paid by personal check not made out to the business) ? If so it was never all jewelry stores that did it and I’m sure some jewelry stores ( and car dealers) still do.
A new car loan is well collateralized. 
The one thing they DON’T want is actual cash. I am friends with a used car dealer and when someone wants to pay cash that is a huge red flag. It means drug money and a fear that the dealer would be robbed soon after the car is driven away. It apparently happens far more than in should. No one is likely to start a shootout over company money, but it is a risk.
UK dealers don’t want cash because it flags them to the HMRC (tax office) for potential money laundering.
Same for my last 2 cars. The first was over 15 years ago and I had to ring the bank to authorize it, the last about 6 years ago was with the same type of chip & pin reader used at my local pub. Each car was around £15K.
The advice for car owners selling used cars directly to buyers is to accept only cash (to avoid any sort of check fraud), but also to do the transaction at a bank:
- this puts you in a public place with cameras, so robbery is less likely, and
- you can deposit the cash immediately, showing the buyer that the cash is no longer available to be robbed back and also confirming to the seller that the cash isn’t counterfeit.
That’s what I’ve done every time for the last 20 years (sold four cars). Prices from $5000 to $9500. Before that I went to the buyers bank with them and got a cashiers check, except the one time I sold to someone I knew.
I’ve only ever bought new cars. The first time (1988) I had to get a cashiers check. After that it’s been personal checks. But I’ve never driven off with the car. Always taken delivery at least a week later.
It used to be you could write a check to “Cash” & hand it to the jeweler in exchange for something from their shop. They can’t do that anymore due to gubmint regulations; presumably the banks won’t cash them, or won’t cash them if they are (in the aggregate) over $10,000, which means 3 people can’t buy $3500 rings in the same day that way.
*- Banks can take in > $10,000 cash from a customer, they just need to fill out the appropriate add’l paperwork. If you’re a business like a jeweler who does this a number of times the gov’t will investigate you & you had better have been paying the appropriate taxes on every single one of your sales. No business wants that extra hassle of an audit of their books.
I know I could look this up, but I’d rather just ask here as I hope I’m not the only person who doesn’t know this. What does it mean to make a check out to “CASH”? I’m 48, and I’ve literally never done this nor heard of people doing this, but it’s not like we talk about check-cashing all that much, especially these days. Why wouldn’t you make it out to the person who is cashing the check or yourself?
Basically, anyone who possesses the check can go to the bank and cash it. It’s a bearer instrument. I used to do that before debit cards to get cash out of my checking account. I’d go up to the teller and write a check to “Cash” for the amount I wanted.
Is it just me, or does that not seem prone to all sorts of abuse? I mean, I guess personal checks generally are not terribly secure as it is, but this seems extra.
The “abuse” is part of the idea. It’s like handing someone a $100 bill. You expect it to be passed around as it’s used.
So you basically give someone a check made out to CASH, they give you $100, and then that check is the equivalent of having a $100 bill or IOU in your pocket, and you use it to pay other people with that, until finally somebody decides to cash the check? So you’ve been floated $100 until someone takes it to the bank?
Maybe - or I give the handyman $100 check made out to cash and he gives it to the hardware store the next to pay for supplies and they deposit it so there really isn’t much float . But what it really is a lot of times is a way for me to pay Joe the Plumber by a check that doesn’t have to go into the business account and it gets deposited into his wife’s personal account the next day.
'Zactly. Checks made to “Cash” are a way to pay a business in an untraceable tax-avoidant manner where the amount in question is bigger than you’d conveniently pay with ordinary paper currency.
Huh. Guess I never found a need to do that. If someone wanted cash, I’d give ‘em cash. This weirdness never occurred to me as an option. Like how is a check not traceable?
It’s not exactly not traceable - I mean, if someone tried hard they could find it but if my $3000 check made out to cash goes to Mary Jones’ checking account rather that Bob’s Plumbing it’s not going to raise suspicion - no one at Mary’s bank is going to pay attention to it. If someone traces it, it will be because of preexisting suspicion.
In addition to @doreen’s point, this kind of stuff was much more prevalent when I was a kid than it is now. My parents did things like that because in the days before ATMs lots of people did not have much loose cash at home. And credit cards either did not yet exist, were reserved for fatcats only, or were rarely accepted by service folks and handymen.
A surprise call to the plumber or roofer might leave you with a bill for the modern equivalent of $500, which you can afford to pay, but you only have $50 in cash at home. It’s Saturday, the banks are closed, credit cards and ATMs don’t exist yet. How do you pay the guy? The same way you pay for most of your retail purchases: by writing a check.
The only question is who to make it out to: Bob’s Plumbing, Bob Smith, or Cash?
To be fair to myself, I missed all that as my parents never used a checkbook growing up. It was simply all cash (or cashier’s check). So all this “write check to CASH” voodoo is completely foreign to me. And were I dodging taxes, I would avoid anything on paper, even if made out to CASH. And even keep cash from touching an actual bank account, as that’s a record of how much you have there, too.
Yeah. Writing checks to cash was/is a middle class non-immigrant thing.
And it’s not really about making things untraceable for your benefit. It’s about affording the other guy, in an era when far more people worked for themselves with no oversight, a chance to cheat a little without you knowingly aiding and abetting tax evasion, wink wink. Maybe you suddenly get a discount on the transaction, wink wink.
No, I got that. The first sentence you wrote doesn’t comport with what I was thinking. I never thought it was for the check writer’s benefit, but rather the receipient’s. But if the independent contractor gets audited and all of the sudden there’s all these checks made out to CASH in the account, that’s noticeable and traceable. Account numbers are still there. I suppose you can put it in another account the IRS doesn’t know about, or maybe cash it at the bank, but I’d suppose they have to take some ID for that, no? I can just cash any check that says “CASH” and nobody cares who I am? Clearly, I must be overthinking this, or a bad criminal, (or an overly cautious criminal.)