No, the total costs of handling cash currency & coins for large businesses will still add up to 3% or more which is in the range of the fees of credit-cards processing. Costs of accepting cash also includes:
- paying for armored trucks and security guards to transport bags of cash to the bank
- percentage of cash lost to crime such as
--- employees/cashiers theft/skimming by handling cash,
--- robberies,
--- counterfeit bills
https://www.google.com/search?q=retailer+total+costs+of+hand...
For a business, a true arbitrage of not paying 3% credit-card fees would be convincing customers to pay by check or electronic ACH bank account withdrawal. Those payment methods avoid the costs of managing loose cash and also avoid the fees from the credit-card processors. But they also have the same privacy concerns as CCs if customers care about that aspect.
Like today I returned some deposit bottles and they had run out of 20€ bills... Which should be the most common ones. Going on trip so I preferred 10€ bills, but still...
Nobody is paying 4% for any cardholder-present transactions.
Where? A quick search on their website shows 2.6%: https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing#rates
often as high as 2-2.5%
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How we pay
- Credit cards account for 31 per cent of transactions.
- Cash accounts for 29 per cent of transactions.
- Debit cards account for 26 per cent of transactions.
So what does it cost to process a transaction? The Bank of Canada survey looked at the estimated cost of processing a $36.50 transaction, which was the median cash transaction in its survey. Costs broke down like this:
Debit card: 19 cents.
Cash: 25 cents.
Credit card: 82 cents.
The study notes that the overall cost of electronic transactions falls as the volume increases, which the authors suggest, may encourage greater use of electronic payments.
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