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NYC Politician Wants To Ban Cashless Restaurants (eater.com)
If New York City Council Member Ritchie J. Torres has his way, the growing trend of cashless restaurants -- establishments that accept payment only in plastic and digital forms -- will be snuffed out. From a report: Torres plans to introduce legislation before his fellow city council members that, if passed, would levy fines on any local businesses that refused to accept paper currency. "I started coming across coffee shops and cafes that were exclusively cashless and I thought: But what if I was a low-income New Yorker who has no access to a card?" he says in a Q&A with Grub Street. "I thought about it more and realized that even if a policy seems neutral in theory, it can be racially exclusionary in practice. Therein lies the problem with card-only policies. I see it as a way to gentrify the marketplace."
Torres believes the cashless business model is inherently classist and racist, as it excludes anyone who might not be able to afford smartphones loaded with digital currency such as Apple Pay or qualify for credit cards, let alone the roughly 22 million Americans who do not have bank accounts. "If you're intent on a cashless business model, it will have the effect of excluding lower-income communities of color from what should be an open and free market," he tells Grub Street. In 2009 Wall Street Journal story, Tony Zazula, co-owner of now-shuttered Commerce in New York City, explained, pretty much, yes, that's right.
Torres believes the cashless business model is inherently classist and racist, as it excludes anyone who might not be able to afford smartphones loaded with digital currency such as Apple Pay or qualify for credit cards, let alone the roughly 22 million Americans who do not have bank accounts. "If you're intent on a cashless business model, it will have the effect of excluding lower-income communities of color from what should be an open and free market," he tells Grub Street. In 2009 Wall Street Journal story, Tony Zazula, co-owner of now-shuttered Commerce in New York City, explained, pretty much, yes, that's right.
Umm, you can stroll down to your local Walmart, Dollar Store, Gas Station and trade your cash for a pre-paid "credit-card" anytime. You can reload that card too. So even if you don't have good enough credit to get a credit card you could go this route.
Lets not even address the elephant in the room, of in modern society you just need a credit card and internet for that matter to function, so if you do not have these items you need to come up with a work around. Like above.
SImply as a last resort - if you're lost your wallet or phone you can always borrow some cash whereas not many people will let you borrow their cards!
Plus sometimes its nice to be able to pay anonymously and not always be tracked by some financial organisation by using their services.
Once cash is gone then the banks + Apple really will be the ones in charge or your life. There'll be no anonymity and if the bank suspends your account then you won't even be able to buy a coffee never mind pay your rent. All the millenials rushing to ditch cash and thinking its yesterdays payment system might want to think about that for a moment especially given how hot they are on privacy and anonymity elsewhere.
Anyone know how operating a cashless business is legal by refusing Legal Tender?
Isn't the entire point to have a common / ubiquitous currency that is available to ALL citizens?
when I look at a dollar bill, it says "this note is legal tender for all debts, public or private".
So I'd think that if you offer to pay your coffee-shop bill with dollar bills, that's legal tender for the debt you owe then for the service. "A creditor is obligated to accept legal tender toward repayment of a debt."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I think what's more funny is that he's trying to be politically correct while implying that black people are poor, rather than just saying it negatively impacts the poor.
PC Principal would have broken broken his legs just for that kind of agregious microagression.
Which is why you will typically find a person that runs the register while other people handle the food. It's a good answer to your observation.
I live in an urban area served by Southern California Edison (SoCalEd). Without fire, earthquake, or severe weather, SoCalEd fails more than once each year. When there is an interruption in electricity -- whether it is for 5 seconds or 5 hours -- my Internet service through Spectrum dies, sometime for over an hour after a 5 minute interruption of electricity.
Many Internet-connected devices require electricity. New York City also experiences occasional interruptions of electrical service. How does a cashless restaurant get paid when that happens?
Just strikes me as a horrible thought process, and show how everyone these days is trying to make every fucking thing about RACE.
Poverty knows no skin color.
This guy is the racist for even daring to make such a horrible statement.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If they haven't sold the coffee to you, then there is no debt, and therefore they don't have to accept your legal tender.
Most restaurants I go to, you get your meal first, and then you pay.
I guess you're right about coffee shops, though-- it's counter service, usually, where you pay then get your coffee.
There's a lot more at stake with a cashless society. Every purchase you make will be stored and analyzed. Do we want that? I thought financial privacy was important to Americans.
Last trip to NY from Canada, I bought only cash with me because of the cut that my credit card get with each transactions in foreign currency.
If most of the restaurants where cashless, I don't know what I would have eaten.
[Legal tender] only refers to the US Government.
The notice on a Federal Reserve Note explicitly includes private debt: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Cashless businesses avoid the legal tender rules not by asserting that they are "private" but by structuring their transactions to avoid creating a "debt" in the first place. They do this by requiring payment in full up front before handing over ownership of goods or performing a service.
What the fuck are you on about?
This is a step in the right direction of not having every fucking transaction go through some 3rd party service. You're saying you're against this?
I tend to rant.
I agree that correlation !=causation, and would further that Americans DO need to worry about race and entitlement.
I boycott fast food kiosks; I want humans to be employed, even if they're McJobs.
I boycott the self-scan checkout lines for the same reason. I'm not trying to hang on to concepts of the 1960s, rather, the death of service by a thousand cuts usually means that the labor costs shift into the quarterly earnings report to Wall Street as a "labor savings".
There are people that lead good honest lives in occupations like: janitor, food server, and the jobs that aren't in tech, health care, that don't lead to glorious McMansions and Estates by Lake of the Gravel Pit. But they need jobs. Not installing kiosks.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You remind me of how some black people say that going to college is "acting white" and therefore derided.
Having just been to NYC and experienced this first hand over the holidays, my belief is a bigger reason for businesses going cashless is to avoid problems like register skimming (i.e. employees pocketing cash from the till). Businesses lose anywhere from 3-6 billion dollars a year in the U.S. from their own employees, and for some of these smaller establishments that might not trust all of their workers and in general are just looking for efficient methods for minimizing this type of theft, removing the temptation of ready cash around just seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
I boycott fast food kiosks; I want humans to be employed, even if they're McJobs. I boycott the self-scan checkout lines for the same reason.
The flaw in your argument is that you assume incorrectly that using kiosks equals reduced employment. Your theory is simple and logical but the problem is that it isn't supported by evidence. Unemployment rates are right in line with if not better than historical norms. You're making an argument based on truthiness rather than actual facts. What actually happens is that people find other jobs doing other more value added activities. The industrial revolution replaced a lot of manual labor (the McJobs of the era) with automation but guess what? Unemployment didn't increase - people found other jobs that previously weren't available. People moved off the farm to jobs that previously didn't even exist.
Jobs need to actually add value. Jobs that exist unjustified by economic need are nothing more than charity. Charity is a good thing but it shouldn't be a permanent state of existence. Keeping an economically inefficient job out of some misplaced idea that you are helping people causes real economic harm to society and individuals. It makes companies that do it less competitive and in the long run it doesn't do the people in the make-work job any favors either.
Politician wants you to give up your choices, want to use the police to force his own choices upon you.
This is the "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" argument. Give up choices? Someone has to give something up here. Either A) the customer has to give up choice of payment type or B) the restaurant has to accept a payment type they might not prefer. Why should the rights of the restaurant supersede the customer rights or vice-versa? Someone has to loose this argument. If the politician does nothing then they are de-facto taking the side of the restaurant. If they act then they are taking the side of the individual. But a side will be taken no matter what. There is no middle ground here.
A customer came in who bought one of those pre-paid credit cards. He wanted to put more money on it. Thing is, we have no way of doing it. He said he doesn't have online access. And he needed money on the card because the hotel he went to required a card. Even though he had cash to pay a deposit. The only thing we could do is sell him another one which cost him a $4.95 surcharge.
Imagine if you were homeless and had to pay $5 every time you needed to get a new card. In my area that's enough to get a container of instant coffee/tea, a loaf of bread, and two cans of vegetables.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
reading up on history, great idea; now go read up on those acts of bigotry and discrimination done to the Irish, Poles, etc. in the early USA; not an issue of race, but of some other mechanism people do to include/exclude others divisiveness is the issue, and sometimes race is used, other times it's religion, socio-economic class, culture, sexuality, etc. in the article, the weasel politician is trying to *make* it about race for political gain riding on the back of his White Knight (hehe) facade the no-bias way would be for him to champion all that would be excluded, not just those of 'color'
Anybody who drinks $5 bad coffee _isn't_ poor, just stupid.
That's Charbucks anywhere, it's worse in Manhattan and other high rent zip codes. Do homeless bums really want artisanal, small plot, central American coffee at $10 a cup?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I am not sure if the cashless restaurants are doing this as a code to be exclusionary. There is just a lot of overhead dealing with cash, especially in expensive cities such as New York City, where square footage is expensive and to waste it for a cash lock box/register is expensive.
I actually think a good solution would be blocks having a reverse ATM Where people put Cash into a machine and it will provide them with/update a Prepaid card that they can use the services of these venues without needing a bank account or expensive tools.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Huzzah for common sense. I hope he goes far in politics.
For this argument, that doesn't make sense to rate it per capita.
For gross numbers, total poor whites have always and still do out total number of poor blacks.
So, if there are more poor whites in total than poor blacks, and we go cashless, it actually will affect more white people than black people.
This conversation and subject doesn't affect why blacks per capita are more poor, this it arguing that public businesses going cashless will affect more blacks than whites and that is just not the case, in fact it would be the other way around by pure numbers of people in the US.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or you accept some level of theft, which will probably be lower than the fees charged by banks to accept cards in the US (also theft, just legal).
Besides the usual no power, no network and everything else required for electronic transactions to happen issues. . .
If everyone went cashless tomorrow, what happens when Visa, MC, Apple Pay, etc decide they want more of a cut than they already get by raising the percentage fees per transaction ?
Do we really want so few unregulated companies with that much control over, what will be, the end cost for a consumer ?
Imagine if it were PayPal only and what kind of nightmare that would turn into.
I am not sure if the cashless restaurants are doing this as a code to be exclusionary.
In my experience, entrepreneurs are extremely uncaring about other people's problems, and those cashless establishments are a good example of them concentrating only on their own problems and totally not thinking about others.
But what if you are that panhandler and all you have is cash, and you wasn't to buy something but no one will take your money.
Now granted if you are poor it isn't the best use of your money to buy food from restaurants buy get it for cheaper at a grocery store (and if you are that poor then you should already have SNAP (food stamp)) however if we value freedom, we shouldn't be so judgemental on their spending habits, because they may have a good reason to do so at that time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
perhaps, but i would prefer the honest approach of "cash is legal tender, accept it or dont open shop in our town/city/state/country
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
There is a local chain grocery store. A friend works there. It was the stated goal of putting in self-scan to reduce the "cashier nightmare" they had. The goal was to reduce 90 cashiers to 60.
So what? EVERY company eliminates costs when it is possible to do so and do otherwise is foolish. Margins in a grocery store are thin to begin with. You seriously think they aren't going to cut costs whenever they can? They don't hire those people because they are feeling magnanimous but because they don't have a better alternative. Hiring someone is an exchange of labor for capital. It's not some touchy-feely crap about "dignity and respect and joy". If you get those things from a job, great, but it's not the responsibility of the company to provide them. If the company does well then it will grow and people working for it will (probably) benefit as a result. But the purpose of a company is not to provide employment.
Whose charity are you talking about?
If I hire you when I have a more economically efficient means to accomplish the labor you provide then I am being charitable to you.
Swiping the margin and paying it to a stockholder rather than an employee is a fool's sense of productivity gain.
You are arguing that companies should hire employees they don't need. If I have to explain why that is a stupid idea to you then there is no point to further discussion. You're thinking of it as a zero sum game and it isn't. The owners of the company (the stockholders) are able to do what they wish with the profits of the company but companies that are going to be around reinvest profits into the company so the company can grow and hire more people. Retaining employees which are not needed hurts the future prospects of the current and future employees (and other stakeholders) the company does need.
You remind me of how some black people say that going to college is "acting white" and therefore derided.
I spent my last few High School years in the US at a majority black High School and was surprised to witness this at my school very strongly. A lot of really intelligent black kids would "act dumb" and get bad grades by not doing homework, etc, not because they were lazy, or unintelligent, but because there was a lot of social-pressure on them to act-dumb.
There are probably thousands of would-be highly gifted scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs doing menial work today because society pushed them in that direction instead of nurturing their gifts.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I am not sure if the cashless restaurants are doing this as a code to be exclusionary.
Yep.
It is more interesting than "exclusionary". Few have followed the shift to
a "rentier" state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_state).
Often the lease for a property includes a percentage ($$) of the till.
So on one side the landlords (and FBI) are pushing for an easy to audit system.
On another side the political kickbacks, protection rackets no longer have a cash till
to drain in difficult to audit ways.
On the customer side privacy games are very much involved.
Did Uncle Ernie pay cash for the lavish meal and wine with Uncle Donald.
If Uncle Ernie is a contractor and Uncle Donald an official then a missing
audit trail has value. That PRE IPO hint, that pre-earnings hint to make a
killing on the street.
Again something the FBI/CIA/NSA/DHS all want to control. Cell phone
location tracking combined with documented extravagant spending might reach
as far as the Casbar in Tangier, Morocco.
Then there are private clubs like THE MAR-A-LAGO CLUB where the club has
club rules for degree of KevinB interactions.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
We shouldn't be judgmental of their spending habits but we should dictate to the owners of the establishments without regard for their "reasons?"
There are no shortage of options if you have cash, particularly options which are viable for people with low income.
There are rules about employment discrimination and even those are morally questionable when it comes to privately held and small businesses. Really, some measure of that is probably fair with the liability immunity that comes with incorporating but since that is basically mandatory in today's legal climate even that argument is weak. A corporation can be two or three people with a convenience store and with preference for minorities and women for SBA loans there is no particular reason these type of establishments shouldn't be able to serve who they want and hire who they want or not hire who they don't want. People have a right to be morons, bigots, or just pick the qualified worker they'd prefer to have around regardless of reason. This shouldn't be an issue because the barrier to start one up with a different policy is ridiculously low.
For mass scale employers of big publicly traded companies it's a different game altogether on hiring but they are still in business to make a profit and it is one thing to require a neutral or less profitable path, in today's society it may well cost some businesses more to accept cash than they take in. Sorry Tony, you're just going to have to start laundering your walking money as well.
Which is why you will typically find a person that runs the register while other people handle the food. It's a good answer to your observation.
Have you ever paid attention to the people in a Subway restaurant? Watch them next time. One person is at the register and another person puts food on to handle food... Then they get busy so the person at the register starts helping out with food- puts gloves on as well... then when gets back to register takes money (still wearing gloves)- then goes back to handling food with same gloves on.
Wearing gloves doesn't stop the spread of germs from money to food. If you handle money in gloves you need to throw them away and get a new pair- but they almost never do.
Not picking on just Subway here- lots of places I've witnessed this same thing happens (but Subway is everywhere and happens right in front of you so something I'm sure everyone can relate to).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Somehow I don't think the guy on the side of racial equality is somehow the scary, resentful fascist police state. You might want to re-think that.
You've just proclaimed blind faith in the utterance of politicians. Congrats.
When you go to the bathroom are you thinking about others? How about when you make yourself a bowl of soup? Are you thinking of others when you deposit your paycheck? And no, not your family/household, that is just a larger group of self because it is all one closely dependent team.
Is there some particular reason these guys should be "thinking of others" in their moves while they try to eek out a living? It isn't like they are closing the doors of cash businesses. Those others like you and those you are talking about obviously aren't thinking about the small business attempts that will be bankrupt and abject failures because of something like this. No doubt you see some rich guy in a slick suit working from a skyrise in your head, in reality there might be some of those overseeing franchising or something but the people who are hurt are John, Jose, Jamel, Sandy, and Sarah who saved up to get enough money just to turn around and borrow the rest to start that franchise. Now they'll lose their life savings or simply not have this lower startup cost opportunity and never break out of the hamster wheel, the rich guy in a slick suit will just do something else. This is especially damaging for John since he already had to work the hardest and save the most because everyone else on the list gets waived requirements and preference for SBA loans while John who grew up on food stamps is 'privileged' even though he systematically has to outperform everyone else to get the same opportunities.
While I think the politician behind this has good intentions, not nefarious, the logical extension of this type of law is to ban bartering. So it'd be illegal to sell an item for money, but agree to trade it for another item. You have to accept cash.
Bartering is the last-ditch mechanism by which The People can escape economic malfeasance by The Government manipulating its own currency. When the German government began printing copious amounts of money after WWI to pay back war debt, you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. If you waited until later in the day to buy, you might need another half wheelbarrow. You could avoid this by bartering - trading something you made to the baker for the bread. The government generally frowns on bartering because it's economic activity which bypasses its ability to track or tax.
It's also possible to do this by using a foreign currency (why the U.S. Dollar is so popular in many countries with corrupt governments). But that generally works better in smaller countries. In larger countries it can take some time for the foreign currency to permeate.
Passing this type of law raises the stakes if the government should ever start to manipulate the value of the U.S. Dollar in ways which don't make economic sense for the people. It's a huge temptation because printing more money is a quick and easy way to basically steal money from people's savings (it decreases the value of those savings, transferring the lost value to the entity which holds the newly printed money - the government).
Is forcing shops to use physical money free?
They don't go cashless out of idealism, it saves them money and thus it saves their customers money. If you force cost on them most their customers will be worse off and we all struggle. Not as much as the average Yemenite obviously, just more or less first world struggles.
I love Canada's solution to the Wheelbarrow problem.:
Coins have a legal tender limit per person per day.
the 51st penny paid to an entity in a day is not considered legal tender.
(Don't recall the exact limits, but it's about 1 roll of each deonmination of values = $1, $50 for coins valued $2-$5; Single coin for denominations $10+)
In my experience, entrepreneurs are extremely uncaring about other people's problems
Well, they are and they aren't. They care a great deal about solving the problem they're trying to solve in a way that people will pay money to have the solution. Or to be specific, they're trying to solve the problem of customers being hungry and wanting convenient and tasty food at a good price. As others have mentioned, part of the "good price" bit is not having to deal with cash.
As an entrepreneur, you can't solve every problem for everyone. I'm sure they recognize that some people like to use cash. They are deliberately deciding they are willing to forego that business in order to streamline their operations. Whether that's racist or classist, well, I don't know if they lost a lot of sleep worrying about that. You'd have to ask them.
It sounds like neither of you understands what that means. In one sense it refers to the fact that fed notes are considered "legal money" and can legally be used in place of the gold and silver the constitution requires but the courts have interpreted it as not requiring.
The notes are legal tender for debt because US currency is based on debt, all federal reserve notes represent debt and are promissory notes. Essentially, they are IOU's the federal reserve issues at its discretion. Each dollar note represent a "dollar" of debt. Although the President nominates the chairperson, the Fed is a private bank and as Donald Trump recently discovered to his dismay, they do what they want and make a profit to a handful of private interests.
A token nod to the actual law is that the treasury prints the bills but the Fed buys them at printing cost and the Fed issues digital currency at will.
"Is there some particular reason these guys should be "thinking of others" in their moves while they try to eek out a living?"
Not at all. Even more: that would be highly unexpected.
And that's one of the reasons why we have laws in place: for people to do the necessary when otherwise they wouldn't be inclined to.
Or to push a political agenda and force people to act in a manner there isn't any sane reason they should. We have laws to keep someone from something underhanded, dishonest, keep a level playing field, etc. The law doesn't exist to force people to sacrifice themselves for others as if they should value those others more highly than themselves!
This entire concept is valuing a group that is pitiable over a group that is actually productive and contributing to society, not because there is any actual need but just for the sake of doing it.
The wants of the homeless buying $5 coffee at Starbucks do not outweigh the wants of a small business owner putting his or life savings into building a drive through self serve coffee kiosk. Just because we need to recognize the poor man as human and having rights doesn't mean those rights outweigh someone elses. It certainly doesn't mean we should support measures that will result in more people who are poor and homeless. What the hell kind of thinking is that?
This guys concept of racism is worse. Racism is an attitude, it is a feeling. The entire reason it is wrong is that race is artificial concept and not a valid way to group people in the first place. There is absolutely no reason anything should be done or not done because of how it INCIDENTALLY impacts some quantity of people who happen to fall in a completely arbitrary and meaningless category by accident of birth.
Like many laws, depends on use.
Other examples include that Captain of the Italian cruise ship that ran aground being sent to prison for not making sure the passengers were safe before he left the ship. And even the law about yielding to a pedestrian, even if they're unimportant, or using a handicapped space instead of letting an unimportant cripple use it.
While you're right that ideally laws shouldn't force people to act civilized, unluckily there is a whole class of self-important assholes who will abuse others, often without thinking, because they feel more important then their fellow human beings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism