New York City considering legislation to ban cashless retailers

Re:New York City considering legislation to ban cashless ret... by ryandrake on Friday March 08, 2019 @10:24AM (#19338283)

Cash levels the playing field. You don't have to ask a 3rd party "pretty please, let me make this purchase, Visa" (credit) in order to use it. You don't have to pay monthly fees to a bank for a checking account (debit) to use it. You don't need an app and smartphone to use cash. Cash is better for your privacy, it minimizes the paper trail about what you buy where, which is really nobody's business but your own.

I've done a 180 on this one. Used to use a credit card for everything, now using cash more and more whenever possible. Credit is convenient, often provides valuable benefits (miles, cash back) and gives you a nice convenient summary of your monthly spending, but in exchange you're inserting an un-wanted 3rd party into every transaction who skims off value for themselves and then turns around and sells your private data all over the place. This trade-off is making less and less sense to me.

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Re:New York City considering legislation to ban cashless ret... by luiscleto on Friday March 08, 2019 @10:31AM (#19338346)

I also take issue with the third party in the middle. But in the end, if everyone wants to go that way, and you're adding extra costs by not doing so, why should everyone else have to pay for it? Ultimately there could be less cash-accepting places and driving higher costs than their cashless counterparts. You would still be able to use cash, but you'd be the one paying for it to exist, and not everyone else who has opted for cashless. Which seems fairer to me.

Unless we collectively decide to take action against giving payment providers that much power and private data, but I don't think that was the driving force behind this policy.

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Re:New York City considering legislation to ban cashless ret... by BubRoss on Friday March 08, 2019 @03:00PM (#19341614)

Adding extra costs by using cash? Credit card companies take %3 of every transaction.

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Re:New York City considering legislation to ban cashless ret... by luiscleto on Saturday March 09, 2019 @06:50AM (#19345712)

Adding costs doesn't mean it is more expensive to you specifically. Just for the economy in general. There are advantages to having cashless payments only. One that comes to mind would be for places in dangerous neighborhoods (which affect low income households more)

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