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Are There Dangers in a Cashless Society? (slate.com)
Slate asks why more businesses are refusing cash -- and investigates the downside. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Stores are eliminating cash registers and coin rolls in pursuit of what they say is a safer, more streamlined payment process -- and one that most of their customers want to use anyway. At Dos Toros, co-founder Leo Kremer said that more than half of the shop's customers used cash when its first location opened in Manhattan in 2009. By the beginning of this year, that number had fallen to just 15 percent. At that point, the various hassles of dealing with cash -- employee training, banking fees, armored-truck pickups, and the occasional robbery -- outweighed the cost of credit card fees on those transactions. The shift wound up being more or less revenue-neutral, Kremer said, but saved a lot of time and trouble. Dos Toros' New York locations have been fully cash-free since the winter.... "After talking to the team and absorbing the flow at the register, we felt like almost everyone who used cash had a card. It just hasn't been an issue...."
But it would be hard to find anyone more gung-ho about the abolition of cash than credit card companies. Last summer, for example, Visa announced a $10,000 reward to 50 businesses that would give up cash entirely. "What concerns me about a cashless future is how much it benefits Wall Street," Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, wrote to me in an email. "They can charge swipe fees of two to three percent not because that's what the service actually costs, but because they have monopoly power."
Citing services like Square and Apple Pay, the article notes that 4 in 10 purchases used to involve cash, but between 2011 and 2016 it dropped to just 3 in 10 purchases (according to the San Francisco Fed). Yet the article's author also presents this counter-argument. "In Shanghai, the venture capitalist Eric Li told me a story about trying to get his morning coffee the morning after a storm had knocked out the internet on his block.
"No one could buy coffee, because no one was carrying cash."
But it would be hard to find anyone more gung-ho about the abolition of cash than credit card companies. Last summer, for example, Visa announced a $10,000 reward to 50 businesses that would give up cash entirely. "What concerns me about a cashless future is how much it benefits Wall Street," Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, wrote to me in an email. "They can charge swipe fees of two to three percent not because that's what the service actually costs, but because they have monopoly power."
Citing services like Square and Apple Pay, the article notes that 4 in 10 purchases used to involve cash, but between 2011 and 2016 it dropped to just 3 in 10 purchases (according to the San Francisco Fed). Yet the article's author also presents this counter-argument. "In Shanghai, the venture capitalist Eric Li told me a story about trying to get his morning coffee the morning after a storm had knocked out the internet on his block.
"No one could buy coffee, because no one was carrying cash."
@Anonymous (Danger? No.) This is what scares the hell out of me. The extreme ignorance of some people. Please take the time to research how money works and that using credit or debit cards only at the very least gives government and the banks all the power over the money. When this happens, banks now can charge a 10% transaction fee and there is nothing you can do about it. Receiving any money is now subject to government taxes. This is something YOU DO NOT WANT!.
Electronic transactions as an option are convenient and useful. As a requirement--a tool of government and corporate control.
Cash should never be done away with, and businesses should be held to the standard that all transactions may be conducted in cash. None of this 'electronic only' bullshit..
People ought to use cash more than they do as well. I've been trying to make a habit of that.
Also, money laundering laws need to be done away with. All of them. Do they prevent crimes? Marginally perhaps, but nothing is worth all the spying and control that they enable.
No - everyone can sleep safely, all crime will be a thing of the past
More like, the crime will follow the money. Now instead of getting mugged in an alleyway, you'll have your identity stolen and your bank account drained.
I think that's an improvement?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Governments hate cash because they make it easy to do business they don't like without them knowing about it.
More to the point, gov't depends on distrust for income. If I fix your sink and you cook me dinner, there's no monetary exchange at all. It's either something between friends or it's bartering. Bartering is technically taxable, but typically not traceable. If we're not friends then I charge to fix your sink and you charge to serve me a meal. Then we both pay perhaps 30% income/SS tax. If we both use plastic then we're also paying a middleman to actually make the payment to each other. A simple relationship has become very expensive for both of us. A relationship has become a business transaction. In that sense, gov't benefits from lack of social cohesion and generalized, personal alienation. In a true community there's very litle "economic" activity.
So there's privacy from gov't to think about. There's also privacy from corporatocracy. And if those are not enough reason to use cash, there's the simple fact that banks have created a lucrative middleman business out of thin air. We're all still essentially using cash. We're just paying a 3% fee to a 3rd party to make the payments for us.
You take cash from the bank, transaction (serial numbers) recorded. You pay gas station for gas, they deposit cash in bank, transaction (serial numbers) recorded. Cash is tracked.