Comment by cowlevel
8 days ago
Your choices affect how policies affect you. When the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions, the person who habitually uses cash is unaffected, as is the person who habitually uses Monero.
8 days ago
Your choices affect how policies affect you. When the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions, the person who habitually uses cash is unaffected, as is the person who habitually uses Monero.
The number of places one can reasonably use cash anymore is rapidly shrinking. Some places it’s truly impossible.
I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.
The law does mandate that. It's just that most purchases are not debts.
I’ve never seen anywhere that doesn’t accept cash? Where have you experienced this?
In the UK, but parking quite often these days has machines that are out of order so please use one of these 500 apps "for your convenience".
At the market, there is a high cost to managing cash and so some of the small sellers will only accept cash reluctantly or not sell because they can't break notes.
5 replies →
Restaurants in big cities and sports stadiums. It's called a cost saving effort, but with restaurants especially it's usually to discourage poor people from trying to come in.
I think some theme parks have started. Not accepting cash should be illegal, and certain places have started implementing laws that make the practice illegal. There are various reasons why a person is unable to have a bank account.
Increasingly common at smaller businesses in western Washington (have seen this in Seattle, Bellingham, and occasionally elsewhere).
Even where it's "technically" possible, it's becoming more difficult. Some grocery stores around here don't staff traditional teller lanes at night, shrinking down to only self-checkout, which are card-only machines. To pay cash, you'll have to escalate to the roaming attendant (or at least, I assume they can find some way to accept cash for that transaction? I can't say I've tried)
Common in the UK, which I feel will hit them in the face when the Internet Research Agency knocks the payment processing offline for a few days.
I've seen retail businesses in NYC and NJ that were no cash. I think NYC has banned that practice, but I'm not sure if that has held.
As mentioned super common in the UK but in the US nearly every sports/concert/event venue above a certain size is 100℅ cashless these days (on top of strictly requiring a specific mobile app to gain entry in the first place)
At livenation concert venues. But the concessions vendors still have a prominent cash tip jar at these cashless venues.
> the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions
This is a particularly American view, a sort of extreme pessimism about the risk of their government collapsing into fascism; while I can see the point in the Trump era, from a practical point of view I'm much worse off with corporations seeing my card transactions. Which includes the card issuers themselves, censoring certain types of locally-legal business.
Average American is more at risk of hassle from Equifax seeing their transactions than even ICE seeing them.
Even worse with the alt payment systems. There's a long list of things it's dangerous to say in a Paypal transaction description. Venmo make transactions public by default, which is insane.
The government can include corporations. You could even argue the American government and American corporatocracy have already swapped roles. Equifax is almost more government than the SEC is.