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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.
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I'm the OP, and I absolutely agree with you. However, TFS posited a situation in which the debt is already incurred.
For all debts, public and private.
Leave it on the counter and walk out.
Bingo. If you deliver services prior to obtaining payment, you must accept cash. Refusing to accept a cash payment after-the-fact would leave you without much recourse to collect in other ways. You're basically depending on the customer's kindness and patience with you.
Starbucks is another matter because they collect when you place your order. They can go cashless because there is never a 'debt' involved with 'pay first.'
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you drank the beer, you owe a debt. And have the right to pay with cash. The only way they can 'protest' is to demand exact change (or the excess becomes a 'tip')
In Norway, you have a right to pay cash in all cases, unless this necessitate over 30 units of money (bills/coins). So you can demand to pay cash at restaurants, but not ridiculous things like a big bag of low-denomination coins. You can't demand to pay a house that way, as it'd usually require over 30 of the biggest bills. Also, it might be dangerous for the recipient.
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.
Anyone has an idea how much does the cash handling and transfers cost?
I can answer that for the case of very small companies, in our case a 6 person ISP at the time, as I was the person handling the monthly billing cycle.
Basically the costs were so insignificant they weren't even taken into account.
We had one of those cash register drawer lock boxes, about $20-30 one time expense, that was kept in a locked desk drawer in a locked office.
Once every two weeks, assuming we had anything in it, I would leave work on Friday about 30 minutes early but still "on the clock", drive to the bank on my way home, and despot the cash in the ATM, bringing the receipt back with me Monday.
For the most part the ATM was on my way, so didn't cost any more in gas or wear and tear on my car than compared to say stopping for fast food on the way home.
Like I said we literally didn't even factor that in, because from my point of view I got to leave 30 minutes early for a 10 minute task and beat out rush hour traffic. So I felt no reason to complain.
Even the company I work for now of about 200 employees uses this same method, although I'm not involved in billing. The plant controller handles the petty cash, which as far as I know is the only reason for having cash there.
We do however have expense forms to report millage on for any personal vehicle usage for work purposes.
10-15 minutes of time plus what, 0.05 miles of gas, are variables so inexpensive that I never bothered mathing that out since, as you can see, they are so very insignificant.
The only one potential factor I have no experience with is for frequent and larger cash amount runs. One may make the argument that the safety of the person doing the ATM run should come into play.
Once you hit that point however, at least in the late 90's, Dunbar armored car services were around $60/visit to do that for you.
That's a fascinatingly weird law.
Not really: it's an anti-dickhead law. Thing is if you say all cash is legal tender then someone can pay back a $100,000 debt using a dump truck full of pennies incurring a large cost on the recipient. Anti dickhead laws only tend to come into effect after sufficient numbers of dickheads cause the law to be changed.
The UK has different rules stating for example that 1p coins are only legal tender for settlin a debt of up to 20p.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It is if they accept cash. The Federal Reserve says:
"all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise."