Philadelphia Bans Cashless Stores (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, Philadelphia's mayor signed a bill that would ban cashless retail stores, according to The Morning Call. The move makes Philadelphia the first major city to require that brick-and-mortar retail stores accept cash. Besides Philadelphia, Massachusetts has required that retailers accept cash since 1978, according to CBS. The law takes effect July 1, and it will not apply to stores like Costco that require a membership, nor will it apply to parking garages or lots, or to hotels or rental car companies that require a credit or debit card as security for future charges, according to the Wall Street Journal. Retailers caught refusing cash can be fined up to $2,000.

Amazon, whose new Amazon Go stores are cashless and queue-less, reportedly pushed back against the new law, asking for an exemption. According to the WSJ, Philadelphia lawmakers said that Amazon could work around the law under the exemption for stores that require a membership to shop there, but Amazon told the city that a Prime membership is not required to shop at Amazon Go stores, so its options are limited. A top official in Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce said that the ban will prevent Philadelphia from modernizing with the rest of the country. Cashless companies argue that cash slows down transactions when change needs to be counted and creates security risks for employees locking up at the end of the night. Supporters of the new law argue that "not accepting cash hurts poorer residents who may not be able to afford or qualify for a credit card or who want to avoid fees that come with changing cash into a prepaid debit card," reports Ars. "Additionally, privacy advocates say that being forced to use a digital form of payment to buy things is a de facto requirement to share records of their purchases with third-party companies."

Comments

Good.

[Rick Schumann]

Glad to see there's still a little sanity left in the world.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cash is legal tender for all DEBTS. There is no debt involved with a retail purchase. A vendor should be free to ban cash if they feel like it, and if you don't agree, you can vote with your dollar by supporting a vendor who accepts cash. Why do we need to legislate this?

Re:Good.

[Rick Schumann]

Because business only cares about the law insofar that they don't want to get sanctioned or arrested, beyond that they'll do whatever they can to benefit themselves.

Re:Good.

[TheGratefulNet]

agreed!

the move to eliminate anonymous and track-less payment is fucking evil. we need to push back against this.

I don't trust my phone at all; and anything that allows non-phone options in the Real World is a good thing.

the millennials can just learn to carry cash. they will thank us old guys, too, WHEN they find out that blindly trusting 'the cloud' is stupid beyond compare.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Her phone, car, and person are each worth far more to criminals than a salon's revenue for a day. She is in danger merely by being outside.

Re:Good.

[jwhyche]

Someone accidentally modded the parent as flamebait. Being a moderator is a very important and sacred duty. For future reference the parent post should have been modded "Insightful." In the future keep this in mind.

Thank you.

Re:Good.

[smoot123]

Because business ... do whatever they can to benefit themselves.

Inconveniencing your customers is often a bad strategy. Raising prices because you're getting robbed and/or have to pay someone to walk large bags of cash to a bank is also often a bad strategy. Are you sure you know which one is worse?

I suggest you assume for a moment that small business owners are not idiots. I am sure they know how many customers pay with cash versus cards. Further, I'm sure they have a pretty good idea how much business they'll lose if they don't take cash. And yet, they somehow conclude taking cash isn't worth it. Could it be they know something you don't know?

Re:Good.

[Rick Schumann]

You're about as wordy as me so I had to get through it all to see you're more or less agreeing with me, but yes, what you're pointing out is that what so-called 'cashless' would lead us to is just one more way The Few (read as: The Rich) can effectively exclude The Many (read as: The Poor and The Middle Class, who are rapidly becoming The Poor, too) from being able to spend their money on quality things. Imagine only being able to buy the lowest-tier of low-quality groceries because the upscale gentrified grocery store doesn't accept cash, and you've been excluded from having any sort of plastic means to purchase things. People paying cash get marginalized. This is what must be fought against.

Cash still a good thing

[lgw]

Supporters of the new law argue that "not accepting cash hurts poorer residents who may not be able to afford or qualify for a credit card or who want to avoid fees that come with changing cash into a prepaid debit card," reports Ars. "Additionally, privacy advocates say that being forced to use a digital form of payment to buy things is a de facto requirement to share records of their purchases with third-party companies."

I think that's a good point. While I have some sympathy for Amazon Go trying to do something revolutionary, their stores are effectively closed to people who can't get a credit card. Their model is fundamentally incompatible with paying cash. Doesn't bother me, but I have all the choices of places to shop.

From the privacy perspective, you're boned regardless if you shop at Amazon Go, since lack of privacy is how their system works. That's fine as long as the other option remains.

Re:Cash still a good thing

[Rick Schumann]

To reinforce what you're saying with a supplementary perspective: there is a growing divide between "The Rich" and "The Poor", and the middle-class keeps shrinking, forcing people who were once middle-class into the ranks of "The Working Poor". It's not all that bad yet but it keeps getting incrementally worse every year for one reason or another. Something like retailers going 'cashless' will just accelerate the process. Some will say "you can get a prepaid debit card without a bank account" but all of those cards have fees attached to them, some exorbitant, and when every penny counts you can't afford to have some parasite company siphoning off your money because you needed groceries.

Re:Cash still a good thing

[markdavis]

>"there is a growing divide between "The Rich" and "The Poor", and the middle-class keeps shrinking, forcing people who were once middle-class into the ranks of "The Working Poor""

That is not what is actually happening in the USA or the world. In both, the "poor class" keeps shrinking while both the middle andupper class have been increasing. In the world it is far more prevalent, but I will stick to the USA

http://www.aei.org/publication...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

So you have to get the whole picture. ALL people are doing better. So although there is a greater divide on the extremes, far fewer people are actually negatively affected by it.

There isn't a fixed pie. The pie has been growing. More people are eating more pie than ever before.

Re:Cash still a good thing

[jythie]

Yet I still encounter plenty of companies that give you a discount for paying cash due to the additional fees credit card companies charge them. I question how much this actually saves them vs simply presenting a more modern image that just happens to keep out the unwashed.

Re: Cash still a good thing

[jythie]

Bank accounts are one of those catch 22 type things, once you are in the system you are in, but if you are outside of it, things can be difficult. Banks can also be surprisingly selective about who they allow to open accounts and redlining has been a historical problem. People with similar incomes often find themselves being marked as a risk or not depending on where they live.

Re: Cash still a good thing

[BringsApples]

Lots of people are poorer than you seem to imagine. This is why those "Cash advance" places are successful.

Re:Cash still a good thing

[jwhyche]

Being cashless doesn't prevent employee theft. There was a local story in the news today where a woman at a cluck and chuck was using her phone to take pictures of peoples debit / credit cards.

Re:Cash still a good thing

[lgw]

The solution to credit card fraud is for America to do what all the other countries in the world are already doing.

Deny fraud protection when someone gets your card and extracts the PIN? (There's a reason chip and PIN is on version 3 or 4.)

Re: Cash still a good thing

[r2kordmaa]

Court order can freeze a bank account and take money from it to cover debts, many people have more debts than money to pay them. Someone with no money, but also no debts can of course get a debit card. But someone deep on the red... they would never see any money they put to bank again. And then there are people who don't pay taxes, they are allergic to any institution with accurate accounting. Should the law make it simpler for people not pay their debts, their taxes and hide criminal money? Probably not, but I think you can see why many people really like their cash.

Re: Cash still a good thing

[thegarbz]

Banks can also be surprisingly selective about who they allow to open accounts

That is an American problem, and speaks to this law here. The justification for the law as cashless being a burden on the poor is solid. But rather than fix the problem through regulation of banking they just force retailers to accommodate a system perpetuated by banks and credit agencies.

In many countries being homeless or poor does not disqualify you from any cashless options.

Re:Cash still a good thing

[mjwx]

when every penny counts you can't afford to have some parasite company siphoning off your money because you needed groceries.

This is backwards. Companies want to eliminate cash because the security problems and handling issues raise costs, which leads to higher prices.

Using debt and credit cards actually increases prices because you're adding additional middlemen into the equation. A card transaction has a minimum of 5 parties:

1. Purchaser.
2. Purchaser's bank.
3. Credit network (Visa/MC/AMEX).
4. Merchant's bank.
5. Merchant.

Parties 2-4 will each be taking a piece of the transaction. They've made rules and in come countries, laws, that the merchant has to hide this cost from the purchaser. So the business a merchant does on card, the more they have to raise their prices to compensate for the additional percentages being removed from the sale. Such percentages can be up to 6% of the transaction amount, not including the cost of terminal or line rental.

Change is obsolete

[Ichijo]

Cashless companies argue that cash slows down transactions when change needs to be counted

Then bundle taxes into store prices and make sure those prices end in whole dollars and not a penny less.

Morons.

Re:Change is obsolete

[DogDude]

If a cashier has trouble counting change, that person needs to find a different job.

-retailer for 17 years

Re:Change is obsolete

[Whorhay]

The speed of the transaction, in my experience as someone that worked as a cashier, is usually killed by the customer not being ready to pay. As a cashier I could usually take the money, press all the necessary buttons on the register, and return the change faster than most customers could get the money out of their wallet/purse. Card transactions were slower than cash most of the time and it still seems that way, especially with the newer chipped cards. Paying with a Check was of course always the absolute slowest way to go about business.

I think the biggest boons to businesses in not accepting cash is reducing the chances of a robbery, cutting back on employee theft of cash, and cutting out conning the cashier by claiming incorrect change. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people claim they paid with a twenty instead of a ten.

Re:Change is obsolete

[Solandri]

The guy in charge of collecting cash and distributing change throughout the day for the booths at a festival was a friend of mine. During pre-festival prep, I noticed him working on the price display boards. He was setting the prices to all end in 99 cents. I pulled him aside and asked him, "Do you *really* want to run around all day collecting and distributing pennies?" The light bulb went off in his head and he changed them all to end in 95 cents. After the first day, he changed the prices again, so they all ended in multiples of 25 cents, with most of them ending in round dollars.

Lesson: Make sure the guy setting the prices is also the one who has to deal with the hassle of dealing with change.

Re:Change is obsolete

[Solandri]

Card transactions were slower than cash most of the time and it still seems that way, especially with the newer chipped cards.

Most people don't seem to realize you can swipe/insert the card while the cashier is scanning your purchases. Then when the cashier completes the transaction, the charge is processed almost immediately. From what I've seen, bagging is what slows the process down the most (that and price checks on items which don't ring up correctly).

I can't tell you how many times I've seen people claim they paid with a twenty instead of a ten.

That isn't always the customer conning the cashier. Numerous times, the cashier has claimed I only gave a ten when I gave a twenty (in one case I was playing in line with my friend, folding two tens together in creative ways, and the cashier claimed I only handed him one ten when I gave him both).

People make mistakes. It's not always malevolent.

Why?

[fluffernutter]

Why is this even up to individual states? This is federal currency.

Cashless Now The Cheaper Option?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when stores used to try to charge fees for using credit cards, and when that didn't fly they started offering discounts for using cash, because it was cheaper dealing with cash than credit? Did that change at some point? Is that why some stores want to go cashless all of a sudden?

Re:The Rich once again benefit from the Poor...

[Rick Schumann]

IDGAF if The Rich get to hide their questionable purchases so long as everyone has the ability to protect the privacy of what they spend their money on too. It's all part of this concept called "Freedom", which may have a potential for abuse, you must just accept that as part of the cost of freedom.

Re:Cryptocurrency FTW !!!

[Rick Schumann]

Cryptocurrency is a meme, and I scoff at and ridicule anyone who falls for it. It goes up and down worse than the stockmarket, blockchain has now been proven to not be unhackable, and it seems like every day I read another story about another cryptocurrency exchange being hacked and everyone losing everything they had in it. LOL no thanks.

Re:is an crime to just leave cash at an cashless p

[NerdENerd]

A restaurant told a group of us the other day that they had a one bill per table policy and didn't want to split the bill. We all said we don't want to cover the whole bill. Split the bill or we walk, they split the bill. A restaurant cannot force you to cover someone else's order, they also can't say you have a debt with them and are going to refuse your legal tender.

Privacy angle

[TigerPlish]

More and more I use cash, I wish to bank less and less, and offer less of a digital footprint. I also wish to deny banks the ability to float with my money.

That, and smaller merchants get robbed every time you buy [thing] with credit / debit. (yes, the banks put a fee on debit transactions too.) Are you a big corporation? Then hell yes I pay with debit AND make a cash-back just to stick you with the fee (yes, I know that's all factored into the pricing, it's more a principal-of-the-thing thing for me.)

Funny that I'm regressing to what life was like before gas pumps started taking cards directly, which for me was around 1994 or so.

And now, even the gas stations don't get my card, I pay with the app for mobil/exxon. I don't trust the card-readers at the pumps any more than I can throw one, I live in the skimmer capital of the US. (or so claims my local rag.) I have reason to believe I've been skimmed, but the bank won't tell me where. They just automagically send a new card.

So now, fuck 'em all, cash is king.

Many of us don't use cash or credit

[raymorris]

I'm fine with the law. Doesn't bother me.

That said, it's factually incorrect, and in my opinion silly, to pretend the only options are carrying cash or borrowing from Capital One. Maybe it's a symptom of our debtor society and lack of basic education about money that when some people think of a card, it doesn't occur to them there is any card but a credit card.

Many of us store our money in the bank or credit union, which is free, then use our debit card to spend our money. In fact that's how most people whose financial picture is improving do it. If you're using a credit card for everything, you're likey going deeper and deeper into debt. If you haven't bothered to get a checking at savings account at your local credit union, your money management probably hasn't improved all that much since you were getting an allowance.

A debit card, spending your money which is stored in your local credit union or bank, is absolutely an option. It's even the option most people use who aren't spending more than they make, going into debt.

Re:Many of us don't use cash or credit

[markdavis]

>Many of us don't use cash or credit.

That is true. But the ONLY option that really protects privacy is cash.

>"A debit card, spending your money which is stored in your local credit union or bank, is absolutely an option."

Card payments of any type leave a trail AND force you to disclose your identity to not only the retailer but also a third party (both of which prevent privacy).

I will also point out that some people who have bad credit, cannot even open a bank account to get a debit card. And now they are cracking down on anonymous debit card sales, closing that avenue too. So it really can still be both a privacy and a poor issue when you are faced with a cashless business.

Re:Many of us don't use cash or credit

[markdavis]

>"Anybody who is too paranoid to let "them" know what groceries they buy should be living in the wilderness and eating squirrels."

Are you really that dim? I tell you what- why not start posting an itemized list of EVERYTHING you buy from "stores" for a few years, where you bought it, exactly when, followed by your legal name, to a public site that is stored "forever" and shared.

Then from that data we will statistically "know" where you live (based on geo data), your age, your gender, if you are pregnant, if you have children, how "healthy" your food choices are, if you eat "too much" fat or sugar or meat, if you drink alcohol and how much, if you smoke, if you vape, what kind of health issues you have, if you are sexually active, if you are incontinent, if you rent any sleazy sexual videos or accessories, how far you drive, if you have a weapon, possibly your sexual orientation, and good guesses at how much money you make, possibly your political outlook, your race, who you might associate with, how environmentally "friendly" you are, your work hours, where you might work, etc.

Oh, and if our "assumptions" are wrong based on our analyses, well, too bad. Not only can't you change it, you won't even know what they are. And what decisions companies or governments make based on those assumptions, now or far into the future, who knows. Shall I go on?

"Shanghai" Bill invents new facts daily / hourly

[Anonymous Coward]

Like how "Blood plasma is stable" as he repeats that lie about 12 times, or "China's Communist Party / Government doesn't censor people directly." -Shanghai Bill is not a valid source of fact-checkable information. In fact, he's full of shit.

This is not why companies like Amazon are doing this. They are eliminating employees and pushing their robotracker technologies. Nobody is opening up cashless drug stores or check cashing bodegas, which get robbed.

Stop lying Bill.

Re:cashless means

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing Philly politicians need to spend their ill gotten cashola somewhere.

You can guess all you want, but I know you're a fucking tool.

Re:They don't have to take it

[Waffle Iron]

Those credit union coin sorters show you a running count. If you're that worried that they're short-changing you on your pennies, drop them in one at a time and wait for each cent to register on the display before adding the next penny.

Re:It's illegal

[bhcompy]

Being an AC

Re:is an crime to just leave cash at an cashless p

[dryeo]

Unless they demand payment upfront.

To be totally clear

[raymorris]

To make this totally clear, you can make six figures and be turned down for a checking account because you bounced checks. I know because I've done that.

You can flip burgers for a living and have two checking accounts. I know because I've done that.

It's not a rich or poor thing, it's a "don't write checks for more than what's in the bank" thing

Re:"Shanghai" Bill invents new facts daily / hourl

[jwhyche]

I consider it to be a status symbol. I have at least half a dozen that follow my every post and mark them "overrated." I call them my overrated ducking. I also have one that I will not name that has been trying to troll me for a year now. It gives the ego a real rush.

Re:membership required

[blindseer]

I remember a conversation with one of my co-workers about a silly membership rule he ran into. He was passing through a "dry" county somewhere and wanted a drink at the end of his day. He found a random bar and sat down to ask for a drink. The lady asked if he was a member as only members could be served alcohol. He said we was not, then asked how to become a member. The lady said it was X dollars (about the price of a beer) and the first drink is free. So he pays for his membership and got his membership card as a napkin under his glass of beer.

If the laws on membership and paying with a credit card are similar then have a similar membership rule as this "gentleman's club" in that dry county. If you aren't a member then make membership $15 with a bonus of $15 off their first purchase. If it's someone that just wants a burger and a beer than might otherwise cost $13.50 then they would either get people to pay the $15 just so that they can eat and be on their way, or order a dessert too to get above the $15 limit. Just have the "membership card" print out with the receipt.

I can imagine that in fact many shops, especially the small "mom and pop" shops, would use a creative membership rule to get around the law. The stores affected would likely be large chains that don't want to bother with such "creativity".

Re:But how will rich people be able to ban poors?

[dryeo]

And how are the banks supposed to make record profits every quarter with laws like that? Luckily in America, banks have the freedom to finance politicians who pass business friendly laws. Being a free country, the poor also have the right to pay off politicians so it's fair.