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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What is the typical fee to obtain the sort of card you describe, to keep the card active for each month, and to add money? If there is a flat fee to add any amount of money, for example, then someone who has access to only small amounts of cash at a time will have to pay the fee more often, and therefore pay a larger percentage of what is added as fees.
and trade your cash for a pre-paid "credit-card" anytime.
Or, and I'm just spitballing here, one could simply use the cash they have in hand rather than jump through hoops.
I realized the KISS principle isn't valued any more, but oddly enough, simple is usually better.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
[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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.