Can't pay with cash what is up with this

[gauss]

I took the coins in a plastic bag to Chipotle for lunch. To pay, I put the bag on the counter and said, "This is $8.10." They looked at me, then hefted up the bag to judge its weight, then rang it up without opening the bag nor counting it. Then they gave me 58 cents change from the till which I dumped into the tip jar.

LOL - reminds me of the FIRST CITIWIDE CHANGE BANK SNL skit form back in 1988.

..Were not going to give you two thousand nickles -- unless that meets your particular change need...

 

[LOL!]

^Ha! I forgot about that ad. Thanks!

 

[6miths]

Most transactions under $100 are just tap now in my part of Canada although you still can use the PIN if you want. In some places (eg Costco) the limit is $200. I have my Visa card on my iPhone and find it very convenient. I frequently misplace the actual card and one of the downsides of chip and PIN is that every card is unique so if it needs to be reissued it is a new number and one can't have duplicate cards. The phone keeps track of transactions. The other day I returned something without a receipt but the record was still in the phone.

 

[mpeirce]

I'm pretty much down to two categories of cash:

barbershop - still a 100% cash shop

tips - when traveling I always tip with cash to valets, hotel room housekeepers, occasionally in a restaurant

Oh, maybe three: also the occasional kid going door to door for school fundraising

The rest of CC. Even the pop machines at the rest stops take Apple Pay these days.

 

[Scuba]

a huge part of their economy is under the table.

We heard about this from our friend who lives in Greece. We normally charge everything but he said many businesses do not accept credit at all. Guess we’ll be bringing lots of Euros with us!

 

[brucethebroker]

The good thing about cash is that if a natural disaster knocks out power for a few days, often you can go to local stores and buy stuff you made need with cash.

Yep, in fact, that happened in Puerto Rico recently. No electricity means no ATMs. I read an article about a non-profit group that was going town to town to "jerry rig" ATM's to temp. power for just that purpose. Many people ran out of cash months ago.

 

[Badger]

I use CC as long as I have control of the card. I don't trust most people, especially those I don't know, to behave themselves with it. A good example of this is paying for meals in restaurants. That is always cash only.

If a big factor of a business to not accepting cash is to eliminate employee theft then I certainly would NOT want to give them my CC.

Cheers!

 

[dixonge]

On a recent trip back to the states, we managed to use up every single penny of the cash we had brought with us. Everything else we paid for with one of our credit cards. Back here in Mexico, we rarely use cards. A good portion of local businesses simply don’t take cards, and even if they did we can avoid potential issues with extra fees and the exchange rate, etc. by just getting doing occasional ATM withdrawals.

I guess that gives us an extra layer of anonymity in regards to purchases, but we carry our smartphones with us everywhere so it’s not like a three-letter agency would have a hard time finding us in about 10 minutes...

 

[dixonge]

Oh, and I forgot to mention this...several of you mentioned cashless cabins in airlines. Obviously you haven’t flown Mexican airlines lately... lol

 

[CRLLS]

My thought is, if a business has a problem with employee theft, they have a problem with the hiring manager.

 

[street]

My thought is, if a business has a problem with employee theft, they have a problem with the hiring manager.

Exactly and most likely other problems. I believe it is a business being lazy in my opinion.

 

[kcowan]

It would be pretty easy for an employee to skim some off the top since there would be no supervision, when payments are in cash.

Usually there is a mechanism such as balancing to the register that prevent theft. In take-out pizza shops, they also count the boxes to avoid under ringing of sales.