Also, people paying cash should demand a 10% discount. ;)
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Also, people paying cash should demand a 10% discount. ;)
Doesn't surprise me at all. If cashless is good enough for the government it should be good enough for businesses. Why should governments be "do as I say, not as I do"? Also, Wraith businesses suffering from underbanking is not the sole reason businesses want to go cashless. In fact I doubt its even a primary reason.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
The solution to underbanking is to find a solution for underbanking. It is not to compel businesses that don't want cash to accept cash. There's a reason some government departments don't want cash too which is why they don't accept it along with a reason why some businesses don't - and I'd think yet again that getting a driver's licence is more important than getting fast food.
This is 2020 not the 19th century and cash is unnecessary and dangerous. I'm not exaggerating in the past I have had multiple armed robberies including one where a gang ran in with machettes, which were held to staff members throats, including one girl who was pregnant, in order to force the manager to open the safe so before anyone claims its not dangerous I'd like to see some evidence for that. I'm not making that up, I was quite shaken up and posted about it here at the time and we also had BBC's Crimewatch come and film a snippet which was shown on national TV about it. The perpetrators were never caught.
Having ignorant people who have no real world cash business experience dismiss the problems of cash as non-existant or trivial is absurd - people DIE due to robberies to try and get cash amongst other issues. Cash can have major insurance issues and other issues. Fix underbanking, don't shove your head in the sand.
Yes, as I work in global risk for an international bank, cash is set by default to a higher transaction monitoring risk than any electronic funds transfer. That's for covering the risk of fraud, sanctions, and money-laundering. Movement of cash alerts the bank's monitoring systems at a far lower threshold than EFT.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
There is somewhere between zero and very little trace-back with cash movement - you generally don't know where cash has come from. There is considerable trace-back with electronic funds, electronic footprints. Further, it takes significant effort to try to cover the tracks of dirty electronic money - it takes no effort to cover the tracks of cash, mainly because there aren't really any tracks.
Well said Tim, put it better than I could have.
I said financial services, it's not necessarily banking specifically. I'm just classifying the problem because we don't have better details, don't read too deep into it.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
I understand, I'm just saying the issues with cash go beyond financial services and that some companies wish to do away with cash due to intractible issues and the fact its now redundant with better alternatives available. Cash is slower to transact (over modern contactless), has more errors regarding mistakes (if the EFT transactions are computerised) and as Tim explained has much greater risk of fraud. And that's before we consider the risks of violence and/or insurance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
Cash is the past, electronic transactions are the future and any politician that wants to really tackle issues of underbanking needs to do that not virtue signal by bullying a fast food restaurant and others to do that which the DVLA doesn't do according to GGT!
We're getting into the weeds, but fuck it, let's go. I do get where you're coming from, and I'm not trying to argue with you or say you're wrong, because you're not. We agree on all material points, this post is going to be entirely tangental. We're about to head into semantics land, please watch your footing, there have been many wars fought here and the terrain is rough. Here's how I look at things:Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Pick any reason you might have for going cashless. Imagine there's a service or apparatus that makes that problem go away. Since that service is working with your money on your behalf, it is by definition a financial service. So if you go cashless for the previous reason, it means your access to financial services is inadequate, because otherwise you would have just used that hypothetical service to solve your problem. Such a service may not actually be available, or affordable, or feasible, or even possible, but at least we've identified the problem space.
If you're starting to feel queasy, now's a good time to bail on this post, because we're going deeper into the semantic weeds, and there's worse abstractions ahead.
Cash is broadly accepted and easily convertable under normal circumstances, and since it doesn't come with any processing fees it is naturally more valuable to a shop owner than any card-based payment. The only reason you would accept credit but not cash is because there is some other problem that cash would cause you that you can't solve on your own with the tools you have available. So either you need better information about the tools that are available to you, or you need better tools for dealing with cash, i.e. better financial services or devices. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's even possible to give you what you need to solve your problem, it just tells us where our focus should be if we're actually trying to help.
So now we have the problem space and a low-res approximation of what the solution should look like. Those give us a rough priority order for the angles of attack, even without knowing the specifics yet. Once we have a better understanding of the details of your problem, we can look at hooking you up with existing solutions and clear whatever barriers there are that prevented you from doing that yourself. If that doesn't work, we can look at creating a service to solve your problem. We can also consider workarounds and replacement services, ways to sidestep your problem rather than dealing with it head on. For example, with my mobile money changer idea from yesterday, the money changer also doubles as a depository since you can take all the cash you have on hand, convert it to debit cards, and unload them into your bank account, sidestepping the entire problem of bank access if that was the reason you weren't accepting cash. After we've exhausted those avenues, we'll need to start looking at more radical solutions. If that fails too, it's probably time to admit that the problem is unsolvable by us.
Whatever the outcome, at no point are you to blame for having a problem you couldn't solve.
Hopefully that helps explain where I was coming from and why I was using that terminology. Apologies if anything was unclear or misleading; I have a terrible record with explaining this type of thing.
I understand where you're coming from but I think there is a service that makes the problems of cash go away. Its called EFTPOS. It is affordable, feasible, widely adopted and pretty universal in 2020.
Companies aren't dropping cash due to a lack of financial services, they're dropping it because of easy availability of superior financial services.
I think you overestimate the negatives of card processing fees, they can be pretty tiny compared to other expenses. Certainly a mobile money changer would need to charge higher fees. Indeed nowadays card processing fees can be cheaper than cash handling fees, cash handling is categorically NOT free. Mobile cash collection services like you describe already do exist and due to the needs of security (not free) companies that provide that service can charge more per volume of cash than card processing companies charge.
Real world example of charges:
Hey Rand, my comment was about the inconsistencies in state gov't policies. ;) DMV (PennDot) won't accept cash but the state-run liquor stores do....so the risk of robbery is moot. The turnpike only recently started accepting debit/credit cards (in the cash lanes), but made more electronic EZ Pass lanes. For them the efficiency is about moving traffic quickly, plus not having to pay people to man the booths, not theft or fraud.
You've outlined the benefits of cashless transactions, I just don't think it's the panacea you imagine. The risks will change, not go away entirely. Robbery, theft, and fraud will still happen even if you remove cash from the scenario -- card readers and computer hacking cause massive losses to businesses, plus put individuals at risk for identity theft.
And during disasters when the power grid goes down, sometimes for days or weeks, cash is the only thing that still works. :bored: