Re:San Francisco considers banning cashless Amazon stores
by awkward on Thursday March 21, 2019 @03:00PM
(#19456074)
There is a root cause fix - it's legal tender. Systems exist that accept legal tender in an automated way. The preservation of the bearer value of cash money is a more important principle than the preservation of amazon's marginal efficiency.
Re:San Francisco considers banning cashless Amazon stores
by chillacy on Thursday March 21, 2019 @05:43PM
(#19457665)
The fix is from the past. Cashless has lots of advantages, i don’t think 300 years from now money will be paper. (It wasn’t 300 years ago either). Technology changes, we should keep up with the times.
Re:San Francisco considers banning cashless Amazon stores
by dragonwriter on Thursday March 21, 2019 @05:46PM
(#19457694)
> i don’t think 300 years from now money will be paper. (It wasn’t 300 years ago either).
Paper money is well over 1,000 years old, though it only became popular in Europe, IIRC, a little over 400 years ago.
Re:San Francisco considers banning cashless Amazon stores
by JumpCrisscross on Thursday March 21, 2019 @02:43PM
(#19455896)
> Give residents a legal right to open a bank account
Simpler: make it a requirement that the banks the city does business with have to offer free no-fee checking to city residents. ("Does business with" meaning issues bonds, holds deposits, does tax refunds, manages pensions, et cetera through.)
Requiring vendors sell a commercial product to anyone is legally tricky. It also adds yet another convoluted cost to launching a new bank in the city. That adds incumbency bias to an already monstrously incumbency-biased banking system.
Wouldn't it be better to solve the root cause instead of the symptoms?
Give residents a legal right to open a bank account - as it's for example the case in some European countries (e.g., in Austria banks are required by law to provide at least a "basic" bank account to people that don't have any other bank account at another bank).
With this approach the stores would still be inaccessible to unbanked people - but everyone would have the choice to become "banked", even if they have a bad credit history, etc.