I refuse to use cash. If I can't pay for something with a CC, I won't buy it - or I'll buy it from a place that does take CC's.
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Cash less society has it arrived?
- Thread starter Happybunny
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Aside from paying a cover to get into a club to see a band, I can't remember the last time I used cash. It's been years. All I use is my debit card.
I think I have 59 bucks in my pocket - money people gave me for a dinner check I used my debit for.
I think I have 59 bucks in my pocket - money people gave me for a dinner check I used my debit for.
It's almost impossible to survive without cash in Australia. Lots of places won't let you use credit unless you spend over $10. At some places, it's $15 or $20. The fees that the restaurant needs to pay for CC purchases is too high, which is fair enough.
Also, none of the cheap and cheery (but still delicious
) Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Vietnamese restaurants will take anything except cash.
Also, none of the cheap and cheery (but still delicious
) Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Vietnamese restaurants will take anything except cash.
I run a shop and I don't accept debet cards. I still accept Visa an Mastercard the old fashioned way. Electronic payments are way too expensive when you run a small business. I have to say, there are a couple of cash terminals and banks only a few meters from my shop so people without enough cash can always retrieve cash if they dont have enough. Also most my services mean customers have to wait or come back before their order is ready so in most of the cases they enough money in their wallet when they come back
Then sorry, but your Panera Bread cashiers are crap at counting. You're seriously telling me it takes them longer to input a cash value into the register and give out the change to someone than it is to :
Input cash value into register, start debit transaction, swipe/insert customer card, input cash value into bank/debit terminal, hand over to customer, wait for the customer to input his OK/pin/account, wait for the device to dial/connect to the bank/transaction processor, wait for approval, take the device back, rip off the customer receipt, rip off the store receipt, input "paid" into the register, hand over all the paperwork to the customer...
Sorry, no, I've never seen card transactions go faster than cash. Ever. Credit cards are barely faster what with now having PIN codes also or requiring a signature or valid ID.
Cash is always faster than credit......unless you can pay with a swipe.
I have a Visa debit card, so the cash comes out of my account (but it uses the Visa service, so the shop owner needs to pay a service fee of some sort). I've tried "Visa Paywave" once, which allows you to pay just by putting your card near a Paywave reader. There's no password.
I think that's dangerous as hell, as there's no protection on my Visa debit card. People seem to like it though.
I have a Visa debit card, so the cash comes out of my account (but it uses the Visa service, so the shop owner needs to pay a service fee of some sort). I've tried "Visa Paywave" once, which allows you to pay just by putting your card near a Paywave reader. There's no password.
I think that's dangerous as hell, as there's no protection on my Visa debit card.
People seem to like it though.
Cash is always faster than credit......unless you can pay with a swipe.
Problem is, until there is a standard that works accross banks/CC companies, all the "Swipe" systems are proprietary and highly dependant on what the merchant went with and what technology is in your pocket.
Not to mention the dangers of NFC based payment systems where they require only 1 factor authentication (something you own) rather than 2 factor (something you know, something you own).
And around here, I haven't seen these swipe systems outside of gas stations.
That is but one example. I can also state that waiting for a little old lady to count her pennies at the super market is so much slower then swiping my debit/credit card. Paying for a mac is quicker then having to count thousands of dollars in cash, or waiting for them to write a check.
Buying clothes is the same, taking the time to count out the cash, or write out the check is slower then swiping and signing. It has less to do with the cashier and more to do with the buyer taking their sweet time
Every buying transaction can and is quicker and easier with plastic then cash
My example, to which you originally replied, was for small amounts in coffee shops, not major purchases. You're moving goalposts now, classic MR discussion tactic that I find disgusting. Keep to what we were discussing, don't put words into my mouth and don't change the argument.
Your last paragraph is a gross generalization that is plainly wrong in my experience. Fast food, food court, cafe lines are long when there's more plastic buyers than cash buyers. I explained to you why by giving you all the steps required for a debit transaction (your initial reply to my post precisely said debit was faster, you didn't even say credit, which is overall faster than debit). So it's not every buying transaction that is quicker and easier at all.
Why do you insist on making this an all or nothing debate when it's obviously a "depends" debate ?
At a lot of places you swipe your own card and enter your PIN while the cashier is ringing stuff up. At the grocery store, by the time the cashier has finished scanning my items, I've already swiped my card and entered my PIN. All I have to do is when the cashier is finished, hit "Yes" to confirm the amount is correct and decide if I want cash back or not. It takes 2 seconds.
If this is true, the average transaction is quite slow by our standard (which I found true in Boston, much slower than London/Paris/Frankfurt.) You're actually operating at the slower end of our spectrum.
For example, everyone in Europe must bag their own groceries. They have a 50cm-1m (1.5ft-3ft; 0.5-1yd) strip after the scanner and stuff piles up quite quickly. While the cashier is scanning, I can still bag everything and have the correct money out of pocket to hand him/her when he/she is done. I found that not only did it take forever for the cashier to do their job when in the US, I also found the customers actually painfully slow on their own. I saw a ton of people talking on their phones/SMSing when at the checkout. What's with that.
So, yeah, maybe in Boston cash is slower the credit, but their both MUCH slower than cash or credit/PIN over here. You guys aren't even in the same order of magnitude.
No it isn't. I gave you what I personally experienced. It is not a gross generalization. Whether you choose to believe it is your business but it is accurate.
I have never been to europe, but when I'm in line to pay for what ever. You can generally hear a collective groan at times when someone in front of you opens up their wallet to count out the money, worse still is a little old lady trying to find the exact change in her purse.
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That's not always the case. Here certainly, cashiers (at most supermarkets) now ask you if you need 'any help with your shopping' – if so, someone will pack your bags for you. Personally I've never taken any of them up on the offer, however.
I'm trying to ascertain the minimum amount of shopping one needs to be asked if help is required, currently it stands at three small items.
This sounds as if they are not automatically adding CC fees to their price structure, regardless if a card is used or not.
I find that very fair for the consumer. They eat the fee if the bill is large enough.
Here, if a retailer is caught giving a discount for cash, essentially 'giving back' the fee portion, the CC companies might just pull their card from that store. (Looking at you AMEX.)
US shop staff are probably out of practice handling cash. People here usually have the right amount ready, or they just hand over the next biggest bill. Cashiers know what they're doing, and have your change ready in a second or two. It's not slow.
If you're at something like a busy London sandwich bar at lunch time, the servers move so fast it would make your head spin. No deep-South-states slow talkin' here.
Bah... civilised people order online and get it delivered to their door. Done it for a couple of years, if I have to go and do a large food shop in person I hate it now. Of course being online it's card only!
Living in London does warp your sense of time. I hate slow people in queues, especially if they haven't decided what they want by the time they get to the front! If I arrive at a tube station and it says anything more than 5mins to wait I tut- "5 minutes?! What is this, the middle ages?!"
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Sorry about that.
I always say Europe colloquially but mean continental Europe. The UK is really "half-way" between the continent and the US in a lot of ways, and I forgot that bagging groceries is one of them.
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I usually try to shop at Farmer's Markets as there is almost one per day in a different part of the city. I would never buy food products online as I like to inspect what I eat. I try to avoid anything prepacked, but sometimes I can't avoid it with products like milk, certain juices, salami, and a few types of cheese. Most meats I prefer to buy at a real butcher and for Central European sausages from Romania and Hungary (and for Italian ones with horsemeat) I need to go to special market.
I guess that I would accept a "veggie box" from a local co-op but never from a chain super supermarket.
No question about that, I can see them struggle to figure out how to compute the change in the head, if the cash register doesn't tell that to them
It's accurate to say that "Every", as in "all of them, all the time, no exceptions whatsoever" are quicker with plastic than cash.
2$ pack of gum at the convenience store. It's slower to drop 2 1$ bills on the counter and leave than going through all the crap to enter pins/sign/wait ?
Really ?
Sorry, it's not accurate at all. It's a gross generalization, and it's wrong (not in the sense that plastic can never be faster, obviously, swipe NFC stuff at the gas station is faster than cash), but it's wrong in that "every" transaction is faster with plastic.
Yikes! I would never, ever, let anyone pick out my groceries.... It's hard enough getting produce the right degree of "done" in person.
One avocado for today... perfect degree of just going soft at the neck.
One avocado for tomorrow ... gotta be a little harder
(It's a good sale)
Sniff the tomato/melon/grapefruit stems to see which one is actually ripe vs just coloured to make it look ripe.
Carrots.... not dry.
Apples ... ooo, local and fresh
Oranges.... always Buck Brand if available...
I mean - How you can you delegate to someone else the picking out of the stuff you put in your mouth?
Oh - I just re-read your post...you're from the UK.... mushy peas and cold toast..... never mind.
Paid for by Debit, incidentally....
I was sceptical at first, but they seem very good at selecting produce. I guess they don't want complaints, after 2 years of buying online I rarely get fresh fruit/veg that's not suitable. I'm quite particular too, I like cooking and try to avoid prepared meals. It's quite common to get online delivery here, I see at least two vans a day on my road. I frequently wonder around the weekly farmer's market near my home, but wondering around a supermarket really annoys me now!