Having to deal with the elderly or disabled adds overhead from employee time or premises adaptations. All that changes is the disenfranchised group. All should be considered discrimination. Maybe it's the European perspective but I welcomed it when the UK required all premises to be wheelchair accessible, even though I am able bodied. I'd equally welcome making accepting the country's currency mandatory as I don't believe society should be excluding any significant groups.

Another reductio ad absurdum? Like I replied to bena before you, with well known adages and slogans it's the core idea that matters, not to take it so literally as to permit payment in corn. Corn is not the currency in general use, cash is. Do you take every slogan and adage entirely literally?

>Corn is not the currency in general use, cash is.

No, it isn't. That's the point.

Debate is impossible if you're going to be merely absurdly argumentative.

You can be a customer if you have the money part of the exchange, otherwise you're clearly not a customer.

In encountering dozens, perhaps hundreds of uses of the very well worn cliche "customer is always right" only once has the conversation or article suffered because it did not fully spell out, in legally precise language, all and every possible exception to the generality that everyone knows is but a convenient generalisation. Some customers may be committing fraud, other customers will abuse the privilege, shares may go down as well as up.

Most find that a useful shorthand in achieving concise and clear discussion, that helps to avoid overly formal and long grandiose Victorian circumlocution, without finding it vague waffle. Something I am eternally thankful for.

We could have an equally lengthy, fruitless and absurd discussion picking holes in Rackspace's "fanatical" support and Amazon's many slogans including "customer obsessed" and "most customer-centric company" because they do'nt spell out all exceptions, limitations and exclusions to the clearly generalised slogan at full length with legal precision.

> You are giving an "invitation to treat". An invitation the establishment may decline

Quite, and yet you write "What if all I have is corn? I'm a customer." You're not yet a customer and you're not offering legal tender or any other form of recognised currency. Which is why it is clearly absurd and takes the discussion away from the actual topic in TFA - the rise, and potential discrimination, of cashless.

At no point did I dispute any electronic payments are exchanging money. That again is clearly absurd. What I did say is the form may inconvenience me (even if it becomes endemic) and I dislike it becoming required. As the article points out 7.5% in the US are unbanked. 12% aren't on the net.

That's a far larger and problematic discrimination than "no hats". I won't be discriminated against, just inconvenienced. Which is why I mentioned, in another comment, I would encourage requiring businesses to accept legal tender (subject to any legislated limitations on paying large amounts in small change that many countries already limit).

Legal tender is currently cash but an equally valid solution would be a state or central bank run fee-free, privacy respecting eCurrency as it could be easily made universal, separate from the banking system, and legal tender. Who knows it might turn out cheaper to run than mints producing coins and notes. In other words something outside the duopoly of MC and Visa that doesn't require a bank or abandonment of privacy to buy a pair of jeans. Then require businesses to accept that legal tender.