America is very backwards because of one thing that happened to you that has literally never happened to me in the 21+ years I have been an adult here?
How did you even find a human to pay? I have always used a ticket vending machine at SFO.
I was looking for electronic ways to send a substantial wad of money domestically once and almost all electronic transfer providers wanted a percentage.
Would be interested to know if there are any online services that can match the transaction fee of a check.
At least they don't expire.
Still, while checks may still be a thing they're pretty rare and rarely required. Mobile and contactless payment is pretty common (outside the food service industry, but I blame the food service industry for that).
It made sense as a convenience fee, until it became ubiquitous. Now it’s a tax that people are blindly opting in to.
I haven't written a check since the late 90's, when I receive a check, I deposit it directly from my phone. I never carry cash. When I shop its nearly all online. Unless its a restaurant, I've ordered and paid before stepping foot or driving through the place.
The point being, business's accommodate their customers and there is a shocking amount of people who don't care about technology in the US, especially outside of business and tech centers.
Or, from https://www.permanenttsb.ie/legal-information/terms-and-cond...:
Taxes and Additional Costs 1. Government Stamp Duty will be charged to your account for each cheque book issued to you (currently €20 per cheque book of 40 cheques). ... etc.
The metro card in NYC is also pretty outdated, the whole metro system looks terrible but talking strictly about technology even the ticket machines are problematic, touch screens that don't work properly and so on; buying bus ticket in PABT is also a quite bad experience.
As for cashless technology, there is significant political backlash to cashless systems. See the efforts by NYC to force businesses to accept cash as payment. I don't think the glacier is going to move much faster until that political resistance is addressed.
Edit: s/cars/cashless/
Android predictive autocorrect is worse than useless these days.
I think that was the point of the originator of the thread - the technology is there, it's just not applied properly. It may have improved recently, but when visiting SF for a few weeks in 2013 and 2014 I was left scratching my head about how best to charge my Clipper card for Muni transit. Topping up the credit via the website had a waiting time of 1-2 working days, so if you were trying to catch a tram or bus into the city centre from the outer neighbourhoods, you had to plan ahead for having enough credit, especially when the weekend was coming up. At BART stations it was usually less problematic to charge the cards - assuming the machine worked, which wasn't always the case.
At any rate, the whole thing felt very uncivilised and anachronistic compared to my experiences in much of Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. (Japan's Pasmo and similar cards require cash for charging and largely don't accept credit cards, but you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere where you'd have to walk more than a block for an opportunity to charge them - or to find an ATM for obtaining the cash you need.)
But it's political resistance for valid reasons. Per the FDIC, 18% of Americans are underbanked https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/ and 8% are unbanked.
The real problem is 1.) banks are a cancer on society. Most banks these days charge you ridiculous fees if you don't have even a $1500 in the account 2.) the unbanked and underbanked aren't introduced enough to credit unions which are ideally their answer to having savings account that doesnt fuck them 3.) unforunately credit unions cant afford to take risk with offering those with poor credit ratings a credit card
Otherwise, consider yourself lucky to be posting on HackerNews from probably working a tech job to be arguing for non-cash accepting stores. Plenty of people don't have that luxury.
The Metrocard is what one would call a hi-rel product, it hasn't been replaced because it works (baring the annoyance of the turnstile readers which one can eventually master and never have an issue). It is being phased out now in favor of NFC and contactless card payments by 2022. It's only really recently that NFC support has become widespread in private industry anyway and most banks have resisted the same on issuing contactless cards due to cost (and little or no retailer support until recently). They are also adding a buyable in cash payment card for those that dont have a phone or credit card for the poorer folks that don't have the luxury (essentially contactless Metrocard).
Touchscreens are another fun animal. The reason many suck is because they are resistive instead of capacitance touch. They can be made far more resilient against damage/vandalism than a capacitive touchscreen of a phone where the agency would go bankrupt repairing them every day. Downside is, resistive screens do really suck.
They are just trying to get that sweet tip.
That's not to say that Germany is less advanced than the US as a whole, but when it comes to consumer-facing software stuff, it feels substantially behind.
But yes, Germany is quite slow to adopt new technology.
Well, no. That explains why consumers might pay with cash, but not why businesses would only take cash.
> thriftiness (stores avoiding card payment fees).
This one, yeah makes sense. Although it has less explanatory power for EC cards than credit cards imo. Aren't EC card payment fees quite low?
Plus IIRC studies show people being more willing to spend more with 'plastic' than cash, so it may actually be a false savings for the business.
And it's not like Germany is collectively taking some principled position against digital payments, they're just slower on the adoption curve; it IS still happening. To me this points more to the general conservatism on digital things that you can see elsewhere as well (e.g. uptake of digital books, downloaded vs physical video games, downloaded/streamed music, etc.) rather than something specific to payments themselves.
Since moving back to the states from China 3 years ago, I’ve gone to the ATM twice, and I no longer have to fumble with a phone to align QR codes. To each their own, I guess.
Very generous to them.
In the UK, the payments system works quite well, but what amazes me is how much physical letters are still a thing: for doctors' appointments with the state-run health system (the NHS), for schools communicating with parents, etc, taking personalized plates on and off a car, ...
Elementary school wants to communicate about some appointment? Do they use the email from us they already have? Haha no, of course they send a letter (that arrives the day of the appointment, natch), and then later call us to complain that we didn't show. And their website looks like it was designed by an intern in 2006, and is virtually never used to communicate useful information throughout the year.
The current elementary school we have does use email...but much of the content they send actually comes in a PDF instead of the email itself, and not the type of with actual text, it's just a bitmap, so to translate we type shit in manually into Deepl (or use OCR for the longer things).
Want to re-up your alditalk account without going to the store? Want to use a credit card, or even Germany-specific debit card? Nope, you tell us your address and we'll send you a letter, which you can then use to authenticate your bank account for transfers. I guess they're worried about...people paying for my phone service on my behalf?
The vast majority of people use BankID, a login system run by a consortium of most banks.
It used to require a cumbersome 2FA device, but for the last 5 years it has also been available as a Sim Toolkit App, so most use that now.
The way it works is pretty cool, you just type your SSN in a login form and immediately a popup window with a word based 2FA appears on your phone.
Seems like less of a hassle to just use your phone than the Estonian system with a physical card reader.
And also the newest is SmartID(used by banks), also based on mobile devices, but without requiring a special SIM card.
I find it extremely weird that not every other developed country has implemented similar solutions.
It's a win-win for all parties, both the government, business and the population - making interactions and transactions simpler, cheaper and faster.
It was surprising how the country behind so much technology innovation was so bad at using it. It was noticeable both in the private and public sector.
It was something that I was later reminded of when reading guns, germs and steel. The author Jared Diamond remarked that the technological progress of any society is not primarily decided by your ability to innovate but by your ability to adopt and use the inventions of others. As he remarks, most innovation happens outside your own country, so it is the ability to learn from others which matters most.
A thing I think people should be aware of when obsessing about having the most cutting edge researchers rather than a technology literate population.