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As More Retailers Ban Paper Money, It's Making Things Awkward For Customers Without Plastic (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shared a report: Sam Schreiber was mid-shampoo at a Drybar blow-dry salon in Los Angeles when someone from the front desk approached her stylist with an emergency: a woman was trying to pay for her blow-out with cash. "There was this beat of silence," says Ms. Schreiber, 33 years old. "She literally brought $40." More and more businesses like Drybar don't want your money -- the paper kind at least. It's making things awkward for those who come ill prepared. After all, you can't give back a hairdo, an already dressed salad or the two beers you already drank. The salad chain Sweetgreen has stopped accepting cash in nearly all its locations.
Most Dig Inns -- which serve locally sourced, healthy fast food -- won't take your bills either. Starbucks went cashless at a Seattle location in January, and at some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes. The practice of not accepting cash has become popular enough to catch the attention of American lawmakers. [...] Despite the popularity of debit- and credit-card transactions, plenty of people do still pay for things with actual money. Cash represented 30% of all transactions and 55% of those under $10, according to a Federal Reserve survey of 2,800 people conducted in October 2017.
Most Dig Inns -- which serve locally sourced, healthy fast food -- won't take your bills either. Starbucks went cashless at a Seattle location in January, and at some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes. The practice of not accepting cash has become popular enough to catch the attention of American lawmakers. [...] Despite the popularity of debit- and credit-card transactions, plenty of people do still pay for things with actual money. Cash represented 30% of all transactions and 55% of those under $10, according to a Federal Reserve survey of 2,800 people conducted in October 2017.
For all debts, public and private.
Leave it on the counter and walk out.
Very few Chinese restaurants take credit cards. There must be some reason they don't want a paper trail.
Why can't one of the hair stylists or other customers take the cash and pay with their credit card?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Maybe I am just blind but I was looking for the âoeUBI needs more dataâ article posted yesterday but it appears entirely gone from /.
Am I blind or was it removed because almost every single poster sad UBI is insane and will never work for numerous reasons?
"At some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes." I'd be surprised if you can find any that accept them. Pound notes were withdrawn 30 years ago.
accept cash or your services are free.
This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.
Especially considering we're talking about services already rendered, the point is moot, they have to accept it for payment of the debt.
Those with cards and those without...
Only 30% using cash is not good
Guess we need a law...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I thought the policy was that people had to provide an alternate source in order to post a paywalled article?
I mean, I know no one RTFA, but in cases like this, most people actually *can't* RTFA without buying a subscription to one specific newspaper.
The whole point of going cashless is to discourage a certain clientele. That TFA doesn't recognise this is dishonest in the extreme.
Bringing legal cash tender is hardly ill prepared! Fuck this business and others like it. Though paying 40 bucks for someone to dry your hair is a serous first world problem to start with!
Though cash can be stolen, it is way more difficult for "authorities" or whoever to revoke remotely. Plastic, charge cards, debit cards are all revocable. I am *very* wary of a shift to mechanisms that can produce financial disability by remote control.
It's been increasingly true for large purchases, but this changeover to plastic for small purchases (as in "food", etc.) is comfortably convenient and OK until it's not.
These issues are separate from the question of how many entities get to "participate in", as in "charge a fee for" all transactions, outside the ability of the actual paying customers to affect those decisions.
This discriminates against the "unbanked". About a third of US adults (including my long-term tenant), don't have a bank account, much less a credit card. There are many reasons for this - bounced a check/overdrew an account in the past, medical or job problems, etc. And for low income people, bank accounts can be expensive. BoA charges a service fee of $12 a month for balances below $1500. So my tenant just gets a money order to pay the rent, cause it is cheaper.
Paper money states "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Once you have accepted a service, such as from a hair salon or restaurant, you now owe a debt until it is paid. So they should have to take cash, even though it may upset their business methods.
You are also paying with your data. Oh, says the data brokers, stop sending this woman coupons for shampoo purchases. Or, this guy buys a lot of alcohol. Let's try to sell him something when he's drunk.
Now handling cash is also not for free but at least with bigger shops it is not 2-5%. Anyone has an idea how much does the cash handling and transfers cost?
Bring cash, because dispensaries take nothing else.
At a place like a hair stylist where you typically receive the service 1st then pay, they legally have to take the cash. Since they provided the service before taking payment you are now in debt to them. Read the note on all US bills "Legal tender for all debts public or private" If they dont want to take it (refused payment) I am no longer in debt to them and will just walk out.
As for the anecdote about some bars not taking cash any longer, it is just completely stupid. Cards slow down the process at a place like a bar so much. A bar i frequent refused cards for the longest time if you walked up to the bar with a card you were pointed towards the ATM sitting in the corner. They gave in and got card readers. The process now is so slow compared to cash, even if the bar tender had to break your larger bill and bring you change.
Ring up the bill in the register, swipe the card, print the receipt take the receipt and card back to the patron for signature. In all this time 2 or 3 cash paying patrons could have been served. God forbid its a card tab. I see bartenders spending minutes shuffling though the pile of cards they have at the bar trying to find that person card, If not having to go back again and confirm the person's name, ring up all the drinks of the tab and repeat the whole process above. Get a few people back to back closing out tabs and you have a bunch of annoyed customers waiting several minutes to place their orders, god forbid the tab holder has questions about their tab.
This is just businesses (IE the corporate level that makes decisions) being lazy and cheap. If you don't accept cash...
You don't have to worry about your employees stealing it, so you don't have to audit it to make sure tills balance out and that deposits match sales receipts.
You don't have to train your managers to make sure they have proper cash and change on hand when the business opens daily.
You don't have to pay employees for the overhead time of counting cash when shifts start or end.
You don't have to pay managers for making trips to banks to get change or make deposits (yes, I know, many businesses already don't pay them for their time while doing this).
You don't have to have a special safe or procedures in place for when too much cash accumulates.
You don't have to have local bank accounts for deposit.
You no longer have to make sure your employees can count or do simple math.
Insurance is likely cheaper since cash doesn't have to be insured and the risk of robbery is decreased.
None of this has anything to do with what the customers want, or what is convenient to them. It is about saving money and reducing the responsibility you entrust to managers and employees and consolidating control.
Better known as 318230.
To payment processors.
People better read up on The Handmaid's Tale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale]. A well written story of a cashless society and what can happen in it.
For all debts, public and private. It says so right on the bills.
Now, someone can refuse to SELL you something as you haven't incurred a debt at that point. But if you've been rendered a service (or generally own someone money outside of an immediate transactional service like retail sale) then cash is, as it says, legal tender for that debt.
It would make an interesting court case, but I highly doubt the US government would allow a court case saying it's OK to refuse US Legal Tender. If for no other reason than they have a very strong, vested interest in maintaining the $ as broadly accepted currency - it's a big part of the reason behind it's stability. If the country issuing it says it's OK to refuse it, that sets a very dangerous precedent.
tl;dr: Currency says it's for all debts and US Gov't wouldn't undermine the $ value/stability by allowing it to be refused. Story is a non-story. They have to take it or forego payment.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Hey slashdot, can you stop linking to paywalled articles? ...or are you receiving kickbacks from these paywall sites for linking to them?
Here in Humboldt County, ands other places where the pot economy is strong, cash is king. Very few businesses blink at a $50 or $100 bill. Most medium sized businesses have they own bill counting and banding machines in the back room. It isn't unusual to see signs stating no debit or credit cards for purchases under $X.00, but I've never seen one stating no cash.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It also makes it awkward for people like me who pay cash for everything in order to keep from being tracked. What about your cell phone? Burner.
Just walk out when they do this.
They should have refused service beforehand then.
If you won't take my money, you won't get my money.
I mean, aren't you in the business of getting money? Isn't that what the actual end-goal is?
It's Business 101: get the money.
But it's not a problem, I'll just shop elsewhere.
I'll also vigorously shit-talk your hipster establishment non-stop, probably on Yelp as well as everywhere else I can think of.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It varies with each country. This link sums it up:
https://www.evz.de/en/consumer-topics/buying-goods-and-services/shopping-in-the-eu/cash-payment-limitations/
But if a vendor accepts cash, he may refuse payments having more than 50 coins as per EU regulation 974/98 article 11.
Yet another way the balance of power shifts in a cashless society.
It should be illegal not to accept legal tender. Period.
The original Die Hard movie has the baddies attempt top steal ANONYMOUS untraceable bonds used by the elite then and NOW! The anonymous use of funds is deemed essential by the leaders of the deep state (as witnessed by Clinton and Obama's multi-billion dollar wahhabi terror project in Syria where the neoliberals beloved of Slashdot's owners bought billions of dollars of ex-soviet equipment from FORMER Iron Curtian states in East Europe and shipped the weapons to their extremist islamic partners in Syria, Iz-real, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq.)
But for the plebs (including you half-wits who willing support neoliberal outlets and leaders), the future is the "Company Store". Cashless means monitored and controlled. In the Human experiment camp known as Australia, using cash has already been criminalised in many types of ordinary transactions.
However, the Deep State has a problem- the so-called 'black economy'. While drinbblers (like YOU) 'think' the Deep State is against unauthorised work activities (cos you are thick enough to think they care about the tax loss), the black economy has always served the Deep State as the purposely destructive influx of immigrants across West Europe proves. Making the black economy work in a cashless society is a problem the Deep State has yet to solve.
The original Orwellian description, 1984, had the Deep State simply leave the plebs to their own devices- but that's the one thing Orwell got very wrong indeed. The Deep State very much chooses to raise up the working classes, and push down much of the Middle class to create a monolithic entity. Orwell ignored the knowledge of the ancients, which teaches that true power lies in the hands of the masses- and thus the masses must always be in a state of total manipulation. Orwell was a victim of 100+ years of British propaganda, which made him too much of a class snob. So to him, the lower classes could be ignored.
So a 'cashless society' is a long standing goal of the Deep State, but not a key current agenda, in case it clashes with the most immediate plans. The current state of 'cashless' is thusly a series of social experiments in lands where the plebs are too thick to fight back, like Australia and China. But limited success in these saddo nations doesn't necessarily scale elsewhere.
Outside oneâ(TM)s home country every plastic exchange has a foreign currency fee. Getting cash from an atm and using it for smaller purchases minimizes such fees. Or do customs people or banks provide no-cost plastic alternatives when arriving?
Since ancient times we have had to deal with the problem of markets preferring one type of payment but having an influx of other kinds. Meant there was money to be made offering the service of converting to the preferred currency. Malls, airports, or anywhere with concentrated shops will have had ATMs available exactly so people can get their electronic holdings into a spendable format. Seems like we will start installing machines to accept deposits and put them on temporary credit cards, or something similar.
But I do wonder if refusing cash is an actually business savvy phenomenon which will endure. Spend untold amounts on advertising for the one in a thousand chance someone who sees the ad will come to your shop, and then turn away guaranteed customers with payment in hand? When a competing shop shows up accepting cash, I will bet their mistake becomes evident.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
In this context, it's a debt after the service has been rendered.
For your own analysis of your financial situation, you can use whatever definition of "debt" you want.
Think about it this way. After they refuse your cash payment and you walk away, what would be their next step? They could sue you, saying you owe them $40. You'd walk into court with the cash in hand, saying "I tried to pay them" and the judge would have a few words for them about wasting the Court's time. They could refuse service to you next time, saying "you still owe us $40 from the last time" - "owe us", a debt.
Any of the workers can take that $40, and put it on their card. Can work in most situations. Stand in line, give the cash to the next one in line and order the coffee to be put on the card of another person. They get the brownie points and the benefits...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You haven't been able to get a pint with pound notes since 1988, so that would be ALL the pubs in the U.K. You can still get pints with pound coins, although contactless is the norm these days. It will be a very sad day when physical currency is no longer legal tender, all anonymity of payment will be lost - which kinda makes the idea of cryptocurrency payments suddenly more relevant, except for that tricky issue of volatility ...
and then the system is down? and can they call the cops if you don't have a card and they will not take your cash?
Can you say economic fail sure I knew you could.
So it's not really that they can't take cash. They can. They just can't make change. So if you give them exact change, you're probably OK. Just leave it and walk out, what they gonna call the cops or something?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Not accepting my cash = no deal.
Handling cash is not expensive. It's much less than 1%. A big store spends about one man hour a day counting, and about another two man hours a week re-counting and going to the bank. We much, much, much prefer cash to cards. We do have to account for an extra 3% in our prices to pay for the cards that most people use.
When I'm out and about spending money, I always use cash.
I don't respond to AC's.
Where I live things are typically the opposite. Half the places I purchase from don't take credit cards and a few don't take debit cards either. It's cash or nothing. Guess that's a reflection of the area (rural) as opposed to the places in the article which are mostly urban.
Seems weird a business wouldn't accept cash though. I get not wanting to have much physical money on-site for theft/security purposes, but turning away paying customers who don't use plastic is just plain stupid
I worked at a fast food joint when I was a kid that kept being robbed. It's a minor miracle I wasn't. The owner kept the lobby open 24/7 until finally somebody got pistol whipped by a robber and the local cops told that owner "next time somebody gets hurt we're gonna hold you criminally liable". Only then did the owner close the lobbies after 10.
I can tell you that if you're running a business that can be robbed doing away with cash is a huge boon to the employees. Though it's going to be interesting when we become cashless and petty crime just goes away. I guess you can mug me for my shoes and my cell phone. But as soon as I get home I'm going to lock the cell phone (and modern DRM means you can't even use it for parts) and my shoes cost $50 bucks on Amazon.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Cash is still legal tender, and this must be accepted as a form of payment. Certainly here in Ireland, and since our laws are typically similar, I would suspect that is also the case in the UK.
Just the title
What's with these weird stories.
I can pay a cashier in the grocery store checkout line in about half the time it takes the average human to pay with a debit/credit card.
Many people still get paychecks - like 60 years ago. Many others have no bank account, because of lack of proper papers or stains in their financial CV. Not accepting cash will deepen the social split.
I'll take your cash, and charge it to my CC. Small 20% transaction fee required.
It's been a while I've looked at other currencies, but over here in Canada, our paper money still says "this note is legal tender". In other words, it's saying, quite literally, shut up and take my money.
I won't be a customer of any business that refuses it; it *really* is that simple.
I and many others would just walk out of somewhere if they don't accept cash and take our business elsewhere.
It would be cool to hack some douchebag's credit card, so when it goes into the reader, it gets "DECLINED". Douchebag then says "Ok, I have enough cash I'll just pa...oh fuck"
===Derp Derp, Ork Ork---PWNIE TIME hehe===. Hope he is very good at washing dishes :O)
On the "cash is good side": Anonymity, ease of use, and it's cheaper (at least in theory: no transaction fee). It's also a more robust payment system, because it works even if there's a power outage, or your Internet is down, or whatever.
On the other side, cash may not actually be cheaper, because someone has to count it, deposit it at the bank, run to get more change, etc.. There is also the risk of theft, depending on where you are located.
For the, the winning argument is anonymity. A way to purchase items that doesn't add yet more personal data to the cloud. OTOH, it is possible that the GDPR will solve this problem. Your average shop does not ask you for permission to collect and share your purchase data - eventually, some privacy organization will notice this and file suit, and the penalties are stiff enough to get even the biggest company's attention.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
If you are going to agree that electronic is easier, then I'm sick of hearing the "pass on the fees" arguments
because I tire of my card being compromised. Too easy to hire waitstaff who make next to nothing and give them a card reader for the promise of extra pay every month.
If payment requires my card to be out of my sight, I pay in cash.
If you do not accept cash, well that is your problem. You either accept it or I get a free meal. It is not awkward at all.
So I am torn on this issue.
Cash has advantages, it is somewhat private, you have it on you so it can't electronically disappear. Yes, it can be devalued, but anything can.
But as a business owner and someone in the military, I can see some advantages of cashless times. All the way back in 1999 when I went to basic, we had 1/2 our first paycheck put on our CAC card and all places on the bases took it. The advantage was we didn't have a cash theft problem in the barracks, which I found out had been a large problem because when they paid people in cash they could have $100s to over $1000 in their locker.
As a business owner cash is a liability. Hear me out. It makes your business a target both from internal and external theft. It means cash counts, deposits, etc etc. I worked at multiple pizza stores in college and cash was a problem. On a good night, we could have $10,000 or more we had to deposit. Let me tell you we had to have 2 drives escort the manager in chase cars because bad guys knew it was the place to rob. Just think, 7/11 maybe $300, Pizza store at 2-4am 10k? Where do you think they targeted? If you have no cash, it makes theft a lot harder.
Last is money laundering, look at Breaking Bad. he had to buy a lot of small cash business to "clean" the cash. Granted now real estate is the place to launder, but for most places, small cash business are the best way to clean money. When everything is documented it makes taxes easier and money laundering harder. So long-term cashless is the best way to go, but CASH should not go away. If for nothing else, but to hold value outside the electronic world.
No, I'm not a drug dealer. I just happen to live in a place where cash still is king.
Once they take cold cash out of the equation, you have zero privacy in any transaction. Anything you purchase is recorded. The government is having an orgasm on how easy it has been to get rid of cash. Not just in the U.S., but globally.
This is all about liberal trying to destroy freedom of speach for conservative. By making it illegal to pay with cash, liberal big goverments make it easy to track conservatives and persecute them at work to get them fired for there freedom of speach.
We have some businesses who openly charge a fee to use a credit or debit card. Including a national chain. They are passing the transaction fee's to the customer. Its perfectly legal, but most businesses have always absorbed the fee's as just another business cost. Now it appears while there is a push to eliminate paper money, there is another push back from local business to embrace it.
going all plastic leaves ALL the money in the hands of the banks that do unprecedented profits on our backs while giving us NO interest on it. It dont make sense to lend all your money to banks. Would you accept to lend all your money to a neighbor with 0 interest ? No ? And you do it with a bank ? These people are making untold sums of profit and you have not a word to say on , who they lend YOUR money to .. how much of that money is invested in foreign countries .. Really .. going all plastic serves only the banks .. not you .. how much interest have you raked in the past year .. how much money if you invested it yourself would you have made ? Grow up and get serious about your money .. it just might not belong to you as you think it does ..
Now handling cash is also not for free but at least with bigger shops it is not 2-5%. Anyone has an idea how much does the cash handling and transfers cost?
Here is the relevant link:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek...
The article is only one page long, but the skinny is:
Around 3% por small businesses and businesses which deal with little cash, and between 0,5 to 1% for big businesses which can better amortize the costs.
If you were a good nerd in a "News for nerds and stuff that matters" site, you would be a member of IEEE, and would already know this. ;-)
Plug: For all our fellow nerds and geeks: This is a great time in the year to become an IEEE member. Either if you are in EE like me, or a computer scientist. There are plenty or societies to chose from, among them the computer society, the communications society and many other. This unlocks a wealth of info and networking opportunities, and many other benefits.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
> For all debts, public and private.
Please learn the ifference between *TRANSACTIONS* and *DEBTS*. Basically, they set up the system so that "food" preparation doesn't start until the transaction clears via the modem. E.g. you go to that Starbuck's mentioned in the article. Clerk rings up the order on the machine and waits for the final step...
* "Will that be debit or credit?"
* "No, it'll be cash"
* "Sorry, we don't accept cash... next"
* Clerk deletes partially-completed transaction on the machine.
* No transaction, no debt, public or private.
The clerk moves on to next customer. And if you argue too much, they call in the cops on you for "disturbing the peace".
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Just like they are doing online. Do, say, or support something these tech companies don't like. You wake up the next day and your cards while still having money on them, are rejected.
There's also the unchallenged legal aspect. In the united states paper money has been legally defined as usable to pay all debts public and private. Can a company legally refuse legal tender?
Depending on the service/business, it isn't a civil debt. You can be immediately arrested, at least in some US states. If you have the cash, and drop it on the floor, they can't do that. And they are not required to give you change. You could try to sue them later, I suppose.
Because banks are federally licensed, they can't deal with marijuana stores in legalized states, so businesses that deal in this product have to shuffle and store piles of cash. They hate this because handling cash is a security nightmare, but until federal law changes there is no other way of doing business.
...the jurisdictions containing these businesses require them to accept cash?
If someone were to create a website listing all of the businesses where one can avoid payment due to the business failing their responsibilities, would this be acceptable according to local laws ?
Requiem for the American Dream
It's time for the government to start issuing electronic money. Right now, the option is legal tender and corporate scrip that more or less freely exchanges with dollars (subject to fees and conditions).
Even most Libertarians agree that issuing currency is the government's job.
I have yet to see a single physical retailer turn down cash.
Visit Stockholm sometime. I was there for an academic conference. The main university canteen refused cash and even a mobile food wagon was credit card only and refused cash. I've not seen that before or since but I have encountered it now. The problem with this is that credit cards charge a percentage fee for foreign currency transactions and some have a minimum on this fee which can make it really expensive for small value transactions.
Most of those "plastic only" shops have inept people (if any at all) managing their IT.
If they're single point of failure internet (i.e. a single DSL line) just happened to go down a few times during their busy period, I'm guessing the bean counters for that company will change their policy. If you don't take cash and your credit card processor goes off line, you don't do business.
Just a thought.
For all the posters claiming that cash is valid "for debt public or private" why hasn't anyone mentioned that rideshare companies like Uber/Lyft only accept credit/debit cards for payment in the US? There was a test case in Colorado for cash rides: https://www.uber.com/blog/colorado/cash-colorado-springs/
Otherwise you are stuck using a card and Uber sure seems popular among people my age.
That's narrowly a US decision, and US criminal law is per-state: always seek advice from a lawyer licensed for the state in question. In Canada, the law is country-wide, and in the case cited, one might well choose to call the police and charge the business with attempting to obtain goods or services upon a false and fraudulent pretence, that they can refuse to accept legal tender. At the very least, you could cause apoplexy (;-)) What the courts will eventually decide is not guaranteed, but I suspect there is at least one case (the essentials of life being purchased by a minor) where the vendor will never get to refuse service. Canada and the US used to have an agreement about currency exchange: I had to use Canadian money in Ohio once, as there was no nearby bank, and it was quite happily accepted at a discount.
davecb@spamcop.net
In the next banking-crisis, they'll just make everyone bail-in with 10 or 20%.
Oh, wait. I forgot. This is the US, where people don't have savings. Just debt and a bunch of credit-cards.
Well, I guess the government can charge it to your credit-card, if they really want.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
You have to pay with a smart phone.
How do you buy a smartphone if your phone died, then?
You have to have to transport the money back to the bank, have it deposited, but then you can get robbed in the shop, or even on the way from the shop to bank, you need insurance, after a certain amount or size you need actually a transport... And what is the cost of all of that ? Genuinely, it may actually be lower than 2 to 5%...
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TFS is trying to shame people who pay in cash, like it's weird. I'm not sure where this high and mighty attitude is coming from, but I do know that I'm not ill-prepared I have cash, and will use it if I feel like to settle a debt.
If you don't want to accept it, I made a legit offer of tender, if you refuse it, I'll take the $40 as windfall profits on my taxes.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
When the iPhone 4S came out. I tried to buy one outright for cash and they flat refused. I had to go get a credit card to get one.
There should be a law that makes it illegal to charge the same for legal tender transactions and credit card transactions which have a 1.5%-4.5% voluntary tax.
Credit card operators are the original facebook+google.+AT&T+Verizon+Comcast all rolled into one.
And have the right to pay with cash.
The contract doesn't necessarily have to allow cash payments. What is written on your money is not legally binding to either party, it's just some stuff the US Treasury puts on our bills. You could argue that cash is binding to the US Treasury and perhaps to other parts of the government, because they are the ones that marked our money with the notice. So maybe you could pay the IRS in $1 bills, and win any protest they might make about it, maybe...
If the terms of the contract are not clear to either party, the not a valid contract of course. So if I assumed it was a normal store that I could use cash at like any other store, then owner doesn't get to seemingly arbitrarily decides to demand payment in a special way. If the store owner puts a sign up somewhere or tells you before you make the transaction, you can either accept the terms or walk out without partaking in goods and services.
Plastic only is a dumb policy for a store, restaurant, or bar. But you don't have a right to use cash anywhere you wish. At least not in the jurisdiction I'm familiar with (US). A municipality could require accepting cash to be part of operating a business, that would be very easy for your city, county, or state to pass. I'm not aware of any requirement by the government today, but I would be interested in being shown some references to the relevant legal code.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
since birth, I can tell you it has been getting more and more difficult to live a cash only life, and much like social networks, there is peer pressure for you not to.
Personally the only option left for me is getting out of the US. As a society, we have reached the point of political and social failure, and while we are not going to collapse today, we are on the path of decline in liberty and economy, while helping the rest of the world justify their own, instead of serving as a beacon to others of what a democracy and society should be like (which for anyone who has scrutinized our history, would already know was mostly propaganda rather than reality in the first place.)
Even late at night a gas station will (unless the employee is an idiot jobsworth) take a $50 bill for $50 of gas. What they don't want to do is take a $50 bill for $10 of gas and give $40 in change. That requires a rapidly accessible till holding more than $40 to make change from, and that's the thing they're avoiding.
This will be brought to the courts as this is an attack on the poor. Just watch. It will happen. And rightfully so. Weeding out those who don't have a bank account or credit cards as "not your customer base" is going to make them pay big time. As for not accepting legal tender,that's another legal issue that they will face in the courts. I don't wish them good luck and I hope that they lose big time.
As far as I'm aware, if the rule is established and posted clearly before the transaction, most courts will find that private businesses can set any sort of policy they want - they may only accept payment in Corgis, for example. Then it's the customer's choice if they use that vendor UNDER THOSE TERMS.
But if that is not stated before the transaction, then they MUST accept US legal tender.
-Styopa
Sure they think cards are faster and such.. but just wait until the readers break. I work at a grocery store and 2/5 checkout lanes have broken card readers. One cannot use them at all while the other has to have customers insert the chipped ends and remove it three times just to be allowed to swipe it. Think they're happy?
I used tinder once, said that to the prosti....er, chick that demanded cash on delivery of her mangled "goods."
Move to Canada, where all the money is made of plastic. Problem solved.
Too brief to deserve that insightful mod, though you may have been the instigator of a productive branch of the discussion. However as I scanned it I couldn't find any clear statement of the underlying linkage. It's in my sig, actually.
The more "they" know about us, the more they can eliminate our freedom by constraining and manipulating our choices. This is why privacy is intimately linked with freedom. If you have no privacy and "they" have some reason to manipulate you (as well as immense resources), then you will have no freedom.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Any business that refuses cash is forcing their customers to accept surveillance. It's just that simple. I refuse to let some vendor of trinkets and baubles blackmail me into surrendering my privacy and autonomy.
Before you buy that burger or movie ticket, ask youself if it's worth exposing your digital footprints to a credit company, you bank, facebook, google, the federal government, Apple, your state government...
From every other country but their own.
There isn't anything stopping a credit card transaction from sending the funds directly to a tax haven.
Go well
If not, you don't owe debt, and when you walk out of the bar you're not going to have lawyers come after you for your failure to close out your contractually obligated debt, you'll have the police coming after you for stealing.
Tricky, but I'll try to explain. In the scenario you mention, where you just walk out, that shows you never had the intent to pay, which is indeed theft.
But let us say that you attempt to pay by card and it is declined. Now, believe it or not, unless they can prove that you knew it was shut down, it isn't theft, but a contract violation, not criminal at all.
Same deal with trying to pay with cash and them refusing. Contract violation, not criminal. At least in most areas.
I don't read AC A human right
Note, Starbucks is a pay first, then get your drink/food place. As such, there is no dent that they have to accept cash for.
I don't read AC A human right
You are right, refusing to take cash won't cancel the debt. However, it does carry consequences. All of this depends upon exact jurisdiction, of course.
1. By offering payment that is refused, criminal charges are off the table. They aren't stealing, they attempted to pay. Thus, contract violation, civil, rather than criminal theft.
2. In many areas it stops the clock on fees and penalties for not paying immediately.
3. You may have to take them to court to be paid. However, the odds are good, especially for petty amounts and not dickhead things like bags of pennies, that the court will simply order you to take the cash.
I don't read AC A human right
somethings not right when they still want your money... just not THAT money.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
The proper response
We have the same situation in Sweden but unlike the US we havn't had a civil war were the goverment forced people to accept goverment issued bills as payment by gunpoint.
In Sweden it there is nothing forcing someone to accept a certain sort of payment for debt like in the US, but as a matter of fact it makes sense, noone want to have the rent paid in cash unless you launder money. But on the other hand, if it's not clear how payment going to be done when you consume the service, you might end up having to pay in silverdollars or your ass, and as you don't carry any silverdollars you end up being sore for a week...
It could also be a security thing. Some businesses are located in places where it is risky to secure cash. They could use one of those safes that allows them to deposit bills, schedule cash dropoffs/pickups of at strange hours by trusted associates, and such things - or they can skip the whole thing and not accept cash at all. The lost sales presumably are calculated to be acceptable versus the cost of doing business in cash.
The situation described in the article here is a worst case scenario that shouldn't come up if the employees are doing their jobs properly. They may need more training.
...my mortgage, gas bill, electric bill, cable bill, phone bill, property taxes, car insurance, water bill, credit card bill, health insurance, and car payment with cash?
to get you banned from owning credit and banking has it in for you then you're pretty well screwed already.
The solution is to build other, parallel power structures to keep those sorts of people in check. Specifically a democratic socialist government. The "socialist" part is important because you need to make sure that everybody is taken care of or sooner or later you'll end up with a large number of dispossessed who'll go find themselves a dictator like we say in China, Germany, Russia, pretty much everywhere a significant portion of the population was abandoned to survival of the fittest..
Anyway, If you don't like private companies having that much power there is a solution: Postal Banking. You've already accepted a fiat currency, so there's no point in railing against the gov't here; unless you're planing to go back to using chickens as a currency, but I wouldn't suggest it, they don't fit in any wallet you can buy on Amazon.com...
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I love how people in that region make universal proclamations about things that are purely local phenomena. When did this become Californiadot? The arrogance would be insulting if it weren't so pathetically insular and naive.
Someone said here "recent immigrants", so is it true that foreign bank cards are not accepted in US?
I was once talking to an economist friend over a beer, and he idly mentioned that one way to end most crime overnight would be to replace the $1, $2, $5 and $10 bills with coins, and get rid of all paper currency. Would be VERY unpopular with the Slashdot crowd of course, but the fact remains it's pretty tricky to pay for half-a-millions bucks of heroin with 50,000 ten-dollar coins. If you assume a coin might weigh ten grams that's 500 kilograms worth of coins.
The other part of this is the fact that it's concentrating a MASSIVE amount of economic and social power in the hands of the payment processors.
Look at the issues with Patreon right now.
Do you REALLY want someone like Visa or Mastercard being able to tell your bank to drop you as a customer?
To simply refuse purchases by you because someone there doesn't agree with them?
Fuck that noise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This actually is very anti any that are disadvantaged.
Many poor or economically challenged if you prefer, do not have bank accounts - no debit card.
Which also means poor credit, and no credit card.
The prepaid cars have huge fees. $5-10 to load $10-100 on the card.
Some years back I was involved with a group of people arguing about the high overhead of having customers only use credit cards. Almost everyone was using CC and the preference was for cash to avoid transaction fees. If you're refusing cash that means that you're purposely paying someone else to make your money.... Why would you purposely give part of your profit to another company?
Cash is legal tender. Plastic is not. If I offer you cash (in reasonable denominations) to pay a debt and you refuse it, then the debt is cancelled. That's the law in Canada. Canada inherits that from British common law -- just like the US but with a later fork. This is an ancient principle, so it's likely to be the same in the US unless there was an explicit change. In this case (hair done), the debt is incurred so you don't even have the excuse of forward negotiation. For completeness: The debt can be incurred before the product is taken. If you run the items through the cash register and say "Total: $19.56", I now have a functional debt. If I hand you a $20 and walk away, the debt is paid. Of course: IANAL .. YMMV.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There is a saying: "a fool and his money are soon parted"
In the 21st century, one might extend it to "a fool and his privacy are soon parted"
I do not use a smartphone, do not use social media, etc. I am no Luddite, I design some rather special embedded systems for a living. I do not, however, care to spill the details of my private life all over the net and allow guys like Zuckerburg to get rich selling my info to anybody who wants to buy it. My reputation has nothing to do with anything on the internet; it's based on my professional performance and my word and a handshake. I do not need anybody's "likes", feel no need to fake a life of luxury and glamour so that thousands of people I do not know can drool over my bogus profile and envy my fake life.
Nobody tracks my cash purchases, and nobody can build a profile of who I know, where I go, and what I like based on my purchases.
I am an American, and I value my privacy and freedom.
Where do you think the payments for credit cards are deposited?
In a bank that need not have a physical branch or deposit ATM near the place of business, such as an online-only bank.
Hasnâ(TM)t been legal tender in the UK since 1988!
After all, you can't give back a hairdo,
I had a friend who was a hairdresser once. She worked for one of those overpriced salons at the mall. She was giving a little kid a haircut once. The mother decided she needed to leave for.....something? And told her that they needed to leave. She said she hadn't finished his haircut yet, and the lady basically said: "Whatever I already paid, we're leaving!" She then pulled off his apron and took him from the chair and left.
Of course the next day she complained to management about her son receiving an "awful" haircut and demanded a refund and his hair be fixed for free.
And also "of course" the management obliged and put in a formal warning against my friend. Because retail.
Also I didn't realize there was some big issue going on about cash being used. I've not seen many (any that I can recall atm) places say cash isn't allowed.
Be me in Argentina 2001 crisis... the bank literally stole all the savings, mine and of everybody else. My mother alone lost 100 000 USD in that bank crash.
Cashless society is very convenient for banks and very dangerous for common people. Be warned.
Setting aside the fact that we don't have pound notes any more (at least in England) is there any evidence that this is true?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No State shall make anything other than Gold or Silver legal tender in payment of debt.
The US Constitution was never amended in that regard.
It's the reserve 'money' that's counterfeit.
"at some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes"
We haven't had new pound notes in the UK since 1984, and they ceased to be legal tender in 1988. So no wonder you can't use them to buy beer.