Almost every comment is about politics, choice, privacy, rights,
markets and percentages.
There's a completely different take; Civic resilience
From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly
superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables,
satellites and routers.
Therefore cash in circulation acts as a buffer that provides economic
stability and continuity of operations.
Also, take a look at a modern European bank note, like we have in the
UK. It's a sophisticated technology. It's not like we still have
Roman coins that any blacksmith can forge.
There are many good, but more subtle reasons for preserving the use of
cash, and regulating business practices if necessary to do so.
I live in DC and support this law not just from an accessibility standpoint but also from a privacy standpoint. I am tired of every retail/restaurant establishment building a profile of me.
The new "meta" seems to be charging you a tax for not using their loyalty card. Items at Tesco are now significantly more expensive if you don't scan a Clubcard. I suppose it is easier to rotate those than bank cards though
Imagine you entering a non-crowded venue and prices on wireless e-Ink tags are changing according to your profile got by face-recognition camera at the front door.
But like serious question, are you tired enough that you'll actually stop using payment cards? Is it worth the inconvenience and losing 2%ish off the top of everything you buy?
I have no dog in this fight as I rarely deal with cash and do not run a retail business. However from a conceptual point of view I really have a viscerally negative reaction to not accepting cash. It is a societal acceptance of the rent seeking behavior of the credit processing networks. I already have to pay a sales tax to ${TAX_ENTITIES.length} different government entities, I don't love that I also have a 3% tax going to VISA/Mastercard/Amex/...
> I don't love that I also have a 3% tax going to VISA/Mastercard/Amex/...
You don’t. The merchant you are buying from is choosing to pay 3% for credit card payments because they believe incentivizing people to pay with credit cards will result in them earning more (via higher prices or higher margin goods) than incentivizing them to pay with debit/cash.
If a merchant wanted to, it would be trivial for them to give you a 3% discount for paying with debit. In fact, Target gives you 5% off for paying with debit via their Redcard, but I suspect they do not advertise it because they still want their non savvy buyers to use credit cards. And they want to funnel their rewards seeking savvy buyers to the 5% discount since they bet the cost benefit for those people does not work out.
> I don't love that I also have a 3% tax going to VISA/Mastercard/Amex/...
People seem to forget processing cash isn't free. If you're small, it's a trip to the bank. If you're large, it's an armored truck. Employee theft is a problem. Counterfeit money is a problem. If we pretend it's 1% instead of 3% (since you can get 2% cash back), 1% for not dealing with the downsides of cash sounds ok.
The EU limits the processing fee to 0.2% of transactions, which solves a lot of the problems with taking cards as a store. Why can't the US? The only downside is less benefits on your credit card because you didn't indirectly pay that 2.8% extra on everything you buy
I've noticed recently more of the food truck or farmers' market type businesses aren't officially cashless, which is illegal in California AFAIU. They just don't have change for a $20.
It's a real problem that some people cannot afford the fees on a bank account, but I would prefer that we find some way to provide everyone with minimum banking services. Like a no-fee government-provided debit card.
I know, the government doing things is bad, but Wells Fargo, Citibank, etc are so heavily regulated, they are essentially a wing of the government now anyway. Maybe in exchange for being "too big to fail" they could be required to provide all American citizens with a standard, transferrable, no-fee debit accounts.
>> It's a real problem that some people cannot afford the fees on a bank account, but I would prefer that we find some way to provide everyone with minimum banking services. Like a no-fee government-provided debit card.
The government shouldn’t even need to get involved here. In the UK accounts have no standard charge and come with free debit card. There’s no reason banks in the US can’t offer this other than the fact people think paying for an account is normal so they can get away with it. Do the “app” banks like Revolut and Monzo offer free accounts in the US? Curious if they’re bringing some competition that could force change.
Besides, having to have change is the really big cost of cash handling. Almost all your customers come in with big notes from an ATM and leave with smaller notes or coins, so you have to keep getting change from the bank. Just rebrand "not giving change" as "mandatory tipping" and it's even a pro-worker move!
Big problem is AML and KYC related legislation - this is expensive to do for people who are statistical outliers. I.e. people with low income. So it'd have to be government subsidised banking.
> It's a real problem that some people cannot afford the fees on a bank account
Plenty of banks offer no minimum checking accounts. Whenever this gets dug into, the fees they supposedly can’t afford are when their balances go negative, which is harder to justify being free.
Can someone explain to me fees on American banks? And the % card surcharges other comments are talking about? As someone from the UK I've never heard of banking fees except on debt facilities and the only surcharges I've seen are minimum spends or 50p charges on cards in small shops, which almost never happens anymore.
Interesting. I get why you'd want to ban cashless business, but many business in a nearby town with a high crime rate are going cashless because you can't rob a Square reader quite as easily as a cash register.
I know a business that went cash-only for the same reason in reverse: the thieves were doing it via chargebacks saying they never heard of the place. Couldn't win disputes even with video evidence.
It looks like many stores cut down on robbery opportunities by not having a cash register. They don't give change back, they only give store credit if you don't pay in exact change. That way, they can just put each cash payment in an envelope and drop it into a time-locked safe. (I imagine that they would do that, I don't know for sure.)
Tell that to the guy who charged $4k of jewelry on my credit card. I've never been robbed of a penny of cash and now I'm having to sue my bank to get that money back.
Thankfully DC has very low crime so they can instead tackle headline issues like this /s
A congressman was just carjacked in SW DC. The city was really great in the aughts and teens and has gone to shit post-2020. I wish they'd focus on cracking down on crime, which is working really well in NYC.
The answer to that is to help your citizens so they don't need to rob a Shake Shack, not to exclude even more people from enjoying Shake Shack while going surveillance mode on everyone's calorie intake
Instead of banning cashless businesses because it's discriminatory to the unbanked perhaps they should focus on reducing discrimination in the banking sector and providing a publicly run electronic payment system.
Actually, paying with cash is a great way to avoid tipflation. Tip if you like, whatever amount you feel is an appropriate employment subsidy for the service rendered, but you won’t be awkwardly forced into it by an iPad.
For me it makes it harder to read. I think it's because my skimming muscles are so tuned to both bold and first-sentence text that when presented such a stark opportunity, I naturally try to jump from one bold title to the next. But the bolded "titles" contain no substantive information, so I have to fight that urge, which means I can't skim at all, even though my attention reeeeally wants to jump.
Argentina has effectively a cash-only economy. Queues in excess of an hour at the supermarket are fairly common partly because of the overheads in having everyone pay with cash (needing to empty the tills, validate large notes, taking time to get correct change out and/or giving change).
Let's not be so quick to say that card payments are all bad.
In India, even rural farmers have easy cashless mobile payments. In D.C., the capital of the US, nobody has easy cashless mobile payments, and even card payments are too difficult, with the government finally giving up and enshrining cash.
Ah yes. SF attempted to float this idea but critics argued it disenfranchises those that don’t have access to payment cards or access to technology that can provide terminal payments.
I tend to agree that physical cash should always be a viable option. Using a card or phone to pay at a terminal is a choice.
If you say, “but cash should be removed for <reason X>”, look at the Square outage a few weeks ago. About a day and a half of no ability to use mobile ordering or paying for goods and services. What happened? DNS issues. If DNS issues can cripple an economy and business livelihoods then there should be a backup.
I agree with most commenters here that cash is useful and that cashless is a step in the wrong direction. I did want to point out, though, that this differs a lot from what at least some commenters on other forums are saying about the ban. All the top voted comments on Reddit about this are against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/washdc/comments/16wacjy/dcs_ban_on_...
I find the difference in opinion between the HN crowd and Reddit kind of interesting. Part of it is probably because that is a local to DC subreddit, but I also believe they're not really considering the privacy / civic resilience angle.
From my perspective, having lived through a near total power outage in Texas for a week in February 2021, having some cash, food, and drinking water on hand is just basic common sense these days. Some local grocers were letting people take groceries without paying, anecdotally, but I don't think that was everywhere or even corporate policy. You also don't want to rely on that to feed your family or pay for basic goods in an emergency. At one point, even the cell network was starting to go down in my area because the generators powering the cell towers were running out of fuel.
FYI, I used to live in DC (and frequent the Reddit community) and I've never heard of the community you linked. Apparently it's a split from the original with only 8k subscribers:
I'd bet there's quite a bit of overlap between the group of users who felt they were over moderated on the original DC community and those that disapprove of these types of regulations.
OK... naturally this is a political discussion; but I find the politics of this interesting and maybe even amusing. I don't live in DC and at don't really have a horse in this race but I sense a contradiction.
I think many would consider Washington D.C. to be governed solidly by American progressives. While the rationale for this law fits solidly within their views on egalitarianism, I wonder why no one is discussing another proclaimed progressive area of concern environmental impact and climate?
I have to think in this case cash must be significantly environmentally more impactful than the electronic payments. Cash requires a surprising amount of raw materials to produce, not all of which I expect to be environmentally friendly. Cash requires specialized transport, not just of the actual cash to and fro, but also of those raw materials. Sure electronic payments require power to operate, but I assure you hard cash is just as counted electronically as electronic payments. Disposal of used cash I expect to have its own unique environmental impacts.
In essence making each unit of currency physically real rather than electronic would seem to have unaccounted for negative externalities, something my more progressive friends go on and on about when convenient, which I don't even see getting lip service in relation to this law. Or maybe in the eyes of the progressive establishment enacting these laws climate just isn't nearly so important as equity/social justice?
Again, not my fight, and I think the vast majority of "negative externality" arguments are made for rhetorical points rather than referring to some well considered analysis not to be ignored... but I would be curious to understand how progressives decide which priorities are of greater urgency than environment and climate given how those issues are typically couched.
I've generally noticed, when I think "why haven't they thought of X" - they have, and I'm not paying attention.
> unaccounted for negative externalities
The scale of these is uncertain, as are countervailing externalities. Looks like someone wrote a paper on it in the UK and came to the conclusion that it's not clear which is worse (i.e., the externalities either way aren't big/clear enough to matter) [1]
> I would be curious to understand how progressives decide which priorities are of greater urgency than environment and climate
I don't think progressives think this way, rank ordering a hierarchy of preferences (to their credit and detriment, at different times). I think it tends to be more "we noticed [problem X] in [Community Y] - let's solve it!" leading to an amalgam of policies.
What about electronic negative environmental externalities? It requires a while network of internet (backbones, cables, satellites, telecoms) and constant electricity generation to feed it, creation of credit cards, etc.
This all seems to have a significantly greater effect than the creation of a new physical bill that lasts 6-10 years.
Can someone explain how this is possible? Doesn’t US currency have the phrase “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private” which I understood this to mean it should be accepted for settlement of financial transactions.
Not taking cash means people without bank accounts cannot transact with you. At present that's six percent of Americans. Millions of (mostly marginalized) people who, in a world where every business made the decision to not take cash, wouldn't be able to buy food or other essentials. It would be like every store converting to drive-through only and telling everyone without a car they're free to starve to death in the street.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|2 years ago|reply
There's a completely different take; Civic resilience
From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers.
Therefore cash in circulation acts as a buffer that provides economic stability and continuity of operations.
Also, take a look at a modern European bank note, like we have in the UK. It's a sophisticated technology. It's not like we still have Roman coins that any blacksmith can forge.
There are many good, but more subtle reasons for preserving the use of cash, and regulating business practices if necessary to do so.
[+] [-] kxrm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didntcheck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdjdjdjdjduuuu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SergeAx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximilianroos|2 years ago|reply
We need a stronger reason than "I want that" to force businesses to give us things — otherwise how do we decide whose preferences we should mandate?
[+] [-] aketchum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|2 years ago|reply
You don’t. The merchant you are buying from is choosing to pay 3% for credit card payments because they believe incentivizing people to pay with credit cards will result in them earning more (via higher prices or higher margin goods) than incentivizing them to pay with debit/cash.
If a merchant wanted to, it would be trivial for them to give you a 3% discount for paying with debit. In fact, Target gives you 5% off for paying with debit via their Redcard, but I suspect they do not advertise it because they still want their non savvy buyers to use credit cards. And they want to funnel their rewards seeking savvy buyers to the 5% discount since they bet the cost benefit for those people does not work out.
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
People seem to forget processing cash isn't free. If you're small, it's a trip to the bank. If you're large, it's an armored truck. Employee theft is a problem. Counterfeit money is a problem. If we pretend it's 1% instead of 3% (since you can get 2% cash back), 1% for not dealing with the downsides of cash sounds ok.
[+] [-] Boltgolt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Guvante|2 years ago|reply
Which they use to fund cash back programs...
[+] [-] lacker|2 years ago|reply
It's a real problem that some people cannot afford the fees on a bank account, but I would prefer that we find some way to provide everyone with minimum banking services. Like a no-fee government-provided debit card.
I know, the government doing things is bad, but Wells Fargo, Citibank, etc are so heavily regulated, they are essentially a wing of the government now anyway. Maybe in exchange for being "too big to fail" they could be required to provide all American citizens with a standard, transferrable, no-fee debit accounts.
[+] [-] basisword|2 years ago|reply
The government shouldn’t even need to get involved here. In the UK accounts have no standard charge and come with free debit card. There’s no reason banks in the US can’t offer this other than the fact people think paying for an account is normal so they can get away with it. Do the “app” banks like Revolut and Monzo offer free accounts in the US? Curious if they’re bringing some competition that could force change.
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
Malicious compliance is fun.
Besides, having to have change is the really big cost of cash handling. Almost all your customers come in with big notes from an ATM and leave with smaller notes or coins, so you have to keep getting change from the bank. Just rebrand "not giving change" as "mandatory tipping" and it's even a pro-worker move!
[+] [-] Maxion|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowsandmilk|2 years ago|reply
Plenty of banks offer no minimum checking accounts. Whenever this gets dug into, the fees they supposedly can’t afford are when their balances go negative, which is harder to justify being free.
[+] [-] ck425|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ma_advertising|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orange-mentor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qup|2 years ago|reply
They put in an ATM, can't charge that back.
[+] [-] DerekL|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarboreus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] local_crmdgeon|2 years ago|reply
A congressman was just carjacked in SW DC. The city was really great in the aughts and teens and has gone to shit post-2020. I wish they'd focus on cracking down on crime, which is working really well in NYC.
[+] [-] blackshaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wly_cdgr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jumpkick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicybright|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metadat|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/new-laws-on-guns-ca...
At first I thought they were banning cash-only businesses, but it is in fact the opposite. Businesses must now accept cash in Washington D.C.
[+] [-] 15457345234|2 years ago|reply
'Driving the news', 'Zoom in' and 'zoom out' seem just like spurious titles.
[+] [-] asgraham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howinteresting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazrgatr|2 years ago|reply
Let's not be so quick to say that card payments are all bad.
[+] [-] rendaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someonehere|2 years ago|reply
I tend to agree that physical cash should always be a viable option. Using a card or phone to pay at a terminal is a choice.
If you say, “but cash should be removed for <reason X>”, look at the Square outage a few weeks ago. About a day and a half of no ability to use mobile ordering or paying for goods and services. What happened? DNS issues. If DNS issues can cripple an economy and business livelihoods then there should be a backup.
[+] [-] mariojv|2 years ago|reply
I find the difference in opinion between the HN crowd and Reddit kind of interesting. Part of it is probably because that is a local to DC subreddit, but I also believe they're not really considering the privacy / civic resilience angle.
From my perspective, having lived through a near total power outage in Texas for a week in February 2021, having some cash, food, and drinking water on hand is just basic common sense these days. Some local grocers were letting people take groceries without paying, anecdotally, but I don't think that was everywhere or even corporate policy. You also don't want to rely on that to feed your family or pay for basic goods in an emergency. At one point, even the cell network was starting to go down in my area because the generators powering the cell towers were running out of fuel.
[+] [-] benja810|2 years ago|reply
> Created 2021, free of over-moderation
The more popular community, and the one I'm familiar with, has 332k subscribers. It can be found here https://old.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/
I'd bet there's quite a bit of overlap between the group of users who felt they were over moderated on the original DC community and those that disapprove of these types of regulations.
[+] [-] blockwriter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbuttgereit|2 years ago|reply
I think many would consider Washington D.C. to be governed solidly by American progressives. While the rationale for this law fits solidly within their views on egalitarianism, I wonder why no one is discussing another proclaimed progressive area of concern environmental impact and climate?
I have to think in this case cash must be significantly environmentally more impactful than the electronic payments. Cash requires a surprising amount of raw materials to produce, not all of which I expect to be environmentally friendly. Cash requires specialized transport, not just of the actual cash to and fro, but also of those raw materials. Sure electronic payments require power to operate, but I assure you hard cash is just as counted electronically as electronic payments. Disposal of used cash I expect to have its own unique environmental impacts.
In essence making each unit of currency physically real rather than electronic would seem to have unaccounted for negative externalities, something my more progressive friends go on and on about when convenient, which I don't even see getting lip service in relation to this law. Or maybe in the eyes of the progressive establishment enacting these laws climate just isn't nearly so important as equity/social justice?
Again, not my fight, and I think the vast majority of "negative externality" arguments are made for rhetorical points rather than referring to some well considered analysis not to be ignored... but I would be curious to understand how progressives decide which priorities are of greater urgency than environment and climate given how those issues are typically couched.
[+] [-] curiousllama|2 years ago|reply
> unaccounted for negative externalities
The scale of these is uncertain, as are countervailing externalities. Looks like someone wrote a paper on it in the UK and came to the conclusion that it's not clear which is worse (i.e., the externalities either way aren't big/clear enough to matter) [1]
> I would be curious to understand how progressives decide which priorities are of greater urgency than environment and climate
I don't think progressives think this way, rank ordering a hierarchy of preferences (to their credit and detriment, at different times). I think it tends to be more "we noticed [problem X] in [Community Y] - let's solve it!" leading to an amalgam of policies.
[1] https://www.actuaries.org.uk/system/files/field/document/Iss...
[+] [-] constantly|2 years ago|reply
This all seems to have a significantly greater effect than the creation of a new physical bill that lasts 6-10 years.
[+] [-] mikerg87|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakkityyak|2 years ago|reply
I’ll gladly pay an extra 5% for a donut if it means I don’t have go to an ATM, withdraw the minimum, and forget the change in my car anyway.
[+] [-] causi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farzinadil|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiqiren|2 years ago|reply
Also... Yes, cash is expensive to handle. Theft, keeping change, a register, maybe a safe, transport to bank, fees from banks etc
[+] [-] pengaru|2 years ago|reply