I'd had bad service lately at a lot of places that require tips.

Cash will tie up an additional employee behind the counter. One of the reasons we are able to not accept tips and pay fair wages instead, is because we don't need a person at the register.

And while you can use that person for other tasks when there is no one in line, they do need to glove up each time they may handle a food item.

Also, in LA cash is a safety issue if you plan on staying open late when traffic is low.

To facilitate anonymous payments, we will accept crypto soon.

how does handling crypto work, do you exchange it for USD daily in order to avoid fluctuations in the value of crypto?

It seems like promoting a fairer society is a priority for you, given your focus on paying fair wages. That’s great! Please consider extending that desire to serving people who do not have credit cards or bank accounts (or crypto …) Plenty of them exist and like coffee too.

This seems like one more problem of policing individual behavior instead of solving the infrastructure problem, by say, having the Post Office run a free bank for the under-banked [1].

[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90683033/the-post-office-is-fina...

NYC had to put a stop to the cashless trend because it is unfair to only offer services to those eligible for banking.

It is unfair to lay that burden on businesses, when it should be the government’s job to operate infrastructure.

It would be trivial for the federal government to offer each individual an electronic money account that legally cannot be closed and is forever accessible to them. And as an adjacent comment wrote, the in person services infrastructure can be tacked onto USPS.

NYC can’t, for better or worse, dictate federal policy. Given the limited scope of its authority, requiring businesses to take the currently available form of universal currency seems not unreasonable.

You want the government to run banks so that stores don't need cash registers?

I wrote “electronic money accounts”, and yes. It is clear that electronic money has lots of utility, and it makes sense for a society to ensure its existence as infrastructure.

The same infrastructure can also serve as an identity verification service, which is also sorely needed.

There is no reason it has to operate as a bank, which would involve becoming a lender.

The government will never never allow any kind of bank account that cannot be closed and is forever accessible.

The closest we have to that is gold buried in a hole somewhere or maybe a cold storage seed phrase in your head and the discipline not to reveal it in torture.

Trivial you say? How so?

Tacked onto the USPS? Why would it be a good idea to have the USPS run a bank with no experience or staff in banking, for every single person in the country, especially when the USPS CEO is more or less openly trying to dismantle and then privatize it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy

> especially when the USPS CEO is more or less openly trying to dismantle and then privatize it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy

Obviously this due to one party trying to dismantle it, which ideally would not happen to our country’s infrastructure. The point is using the network and real estate and organization of an existing federal government entity that already spans the nooks and crannies of the US to get a nationwide benefit up and running.

Yeah, fair enough, the idea makes some sense. But the fact that it’s an entire party trying to dismantle USPS, a party that has a lot of power, and not just one person, is precisely the very strong reason I wouldn’t be able to trust it or buy into a plan to add accounts and depository banking to the postal service. (I already get suspicious with articles that start by framing the USPS as an unprofitable business. They might indeed be “losing” money, but it’s a branch of our tax-funded government, and we don’t expect other branches to be profitable businesses. Does it even make sense to frame the police or FBI or firefighters as “unprofitable”? The narrative of the USPS deficit seems like part of the plan to privatize it...)

On top of that, I guess it’s very, very far from trivial to spin up such a service even though it’s true the USPS has a nationwide physical presence. It might be fair to say it’s easier than starting from scratch, maybe, but the USPS has entrenched practices and infrastructure that might not easily extend to physical and digital security required to handle high volume finances at all.

Does having electronic accounts cover everyone? We seem to have a rapidly growing homeless population in the US, and many homeless people have real difficulties holding on to cell phones & documents long term, anything that would allow them to authenticate and/or use an electronic account.

If electronic accounts were the solution, I could also imagine the primary infrastructure being a phone app (maybe not entirely dissimilar from China’s WeChat). In-person cash transactions for deposits and withdrawals could perhaps be mostly handled by ATMs?

> but the USPS has entrenched practices and infrastructure that might not easily extend to physical and digital security required to handle high volume finances at all.

The USPS has handled identify verification for the federal government since many, many, many decades. If you want a US passport, you have to go to a USPS office to get your identity verified. This is the logistically difficult part, since it involves so much labor, but it’s already done!

As for electronic accounts, the hardest and most laborious part is identity verification. The electronic accounts part can be taken care of by some IT department, just like visa/Mastercard/any number of banks and financial institutions (including the federal reserve) do.

Cash businesses tend to get robbed much more often than places that don’t take it. Cash-only businesses, like marijuana dispensaries, are notorious for being robbed here in Seattle.

Plenty of places have waiters carry around hip bags with cash instead of doing it at the register. It's no less convient than carrying around a card reader.

I actually say this virtually snark free, but I've always thought of Chick-fil-A as a Christian religious group that happens to run a chicken sandwich restaurant. I've certainly had lots of experience eating their food and talking to the employees and a few owners. I suspect that's part of the atmosphere.

I think it depends on if the server gets a percentage of the total bill (basically auto-tipping if you think of it that way). Basically everything on the menu gets raised in price 20% and that's the tip portion, ideally shared with the kitchen.

This provides a strong incentive for good service (and good cooking) as an empty restaurant (fewer return customers) means less income. Otherwise, why bother providing excellent service, if you're paid the same hourly wage if the place is packed or if it's half-full?

This is kind of anecdata. We've all had terrible service, and some of us live in economies which are no tip or no routine tip.

At scale, I continue to believe there isn't a strong relationship between tipping and service, as much as between salary and service or service culture and service.

Transition periods are always complex. If tipping was verboten there would still be a cohort complaining about it for years, about both income side, and service quality side issues.

I always thought good service is based in good training and staff education. Which includes basics of the business that happy customers return...

Chick-fil-a usually makes franchise owners be hands on in the Restaurant, and you cannot own like 20 of them. I think most people own one. At least where I grew up they consistently paid the highest of any fast food place and I am pretty sure they offered tuition reimbursement. The other main benefit they have is the whole closed on Sunday’s thing which makes scheduling more favorable since you know you won’t have to work on sundays.

> On the other hand Chick-fil-A is able to make their employees act friendly. I wonder how they do it.

I would assume they make them do it via management, training, treating them well, and firing for non-compliance.