Lost in the sense of look around how people are spending their money. I'm very happy for that law, and hope common sense will prevail and cash will be around for a long time. But you can't deny that vast majority of money transactions in the modern world is cashless. Hence my point that the battle is lost - if you take away average person's right of using their credit cards or bank accounts, how are they supposed to pay their bills or buy food?

I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash, as far as I can tell, and that the only choice is to use their regular till but that is staffed by one person so it is always a long wait which is what I am sure Walmart has planned to discourage its use.

> I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash

The machines fall back to credit/debit only when they need to restocked with cash or coins, or if the machine needs to be serviced. Some stores don't want to pay for the labor needed to maintain their cash features.

The last time I was in a Walmart was over a year ago, but their machines took cash.

I looked and these ones do not. I wonder if the helpers could print out a receipt and walk you over to customer service and check out there but these machines do not have the ability to take cash or dispense it like some I have seen at other places. I will bother to ask the helpers next time I am up there.

>I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash, as far as I can tell

They do where I live.

All of the purpose build self checkout machines at Home Depot are cashless but all the ones that can be operated by an employee do cash when in self checkout mode.

Falling back on cash helps here, but you are not wrong.

It is an important matter! Needs to be worked through, rights established and enforced.

> How is it lost? Jurisdictions like New Jersey, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Philadelphia have legislated that businesses must accept cash.

It's lost because they’re mostly legislating that “storefront” businesses must accept cash when both having storefronts and accepting cash are things businesses are less interested in. So, what they have actually done is accelerate the death of storefronts rather than assure that cash is usable.