This is what people think of when someone "uses cash". Not hauling tens of thousands to buy a used car or to settle the bill for having your bathroom tiled, which would be cases I too would raise an eyebrow over.

If a merchant tries to promote cash options I immediately think they’re doing it for tax evasion reasons - not because of the touted reason that “card payments cost more to process” (they don’t once you factor in the cost of handling cash).

With credit cards you pay a fee, but you don't have to deal with all of those other things that people often don't consider.

Apart from a transit card (all the mass transit also takes cash ... no fee added), I'm not going to pay to feed the surveillance machine.

Where I live in Seattle, a lot of businesses simply don't handle cash at all, because break-ins for the cash register are quite expensive to deal with, and they circumvent that problem by simply posting outside the business that there is no cash.

One of the few businesses near me that must take cash, a dispensary, recently had an issue where somebody tried to break in using a stolen pickup truck to crash into the building. They didn't get the cash because they didn't get past the interior bollard system, but they did cause enough structural damage that the roof partially collapsed into the street.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...

But i've paid with cash all over europe, and except for some vending machines, i've never been turned down, be it london, paris, berlin, belgrade or athens... from large supermarkets and museums, to local corner newsstands with a small fridge and cold drinks and local fast food joints. On the other hand, the most unsafe I ever felt as a traveller was in chicago, supposedly in a "nicer/safe area", and I've been through the balkans in the 1990s.

I’m definitely looked as crazy in my friend group from time to time, but over the years I’ve just become known as the guy who will always have cash on him if necessary so I guess the walking ATM bit helped with acceptance of it?

I figure that if folks don’t take a stand and use cash even if they don’t need to now, we will lose the ability to later. I don’t want to live in a world where all my purchases are mineable, because that eventually turns into monitored and then authorized.

The inconvenience is a small price to pay for freedom from surveillance.

It has amused me though over the years how bad cash handling skills have become. When I was a cashier as a teenager 25+ years ago, myself and all my fellow coworkers could break change at relative light speed and often just from mental math/memory. Now it’s amusing watching a young cashier give change back on a $48.31 order after handing them a $100 bill. Sometimes takes longer than the proverbial grandma writing a check back in my day.

I believe it was part of an agreement with the card companies over anti-competitive behavior.

What's your opinion on that? In NA, for small businesses it's common to offer to pay in cash to avoid paying sales tax.

It's also not common (and illegal).. this account posts a lot of vague platitudes.

This is almost always in a portion of the invoice written up at around half the agreed amount, and the rest in cash. Or for smaller jobs just on the side with no paperwork involved outside of a firm handshake.

This is the norm for the lower end of the trades. If you’re dealing with a single owner company with a few employees I’d be very surprised if they would not be willing.

Yeah, once you get into “real companies” that are charging upper middle class rates on million dollar properties it changes.

I haven’t had trades work done in Mexico, but considering all my visits were effectively cash only transactions I’d be pretty surprised if it wasn’t at least as common as in the US.

I don't know about Australia, but in New Zealand many small retailers and restaurants add a card payment surcharge (typically 1.5%-2.5%) automatically when you pay by card. So you are somewhat penalised for the convenience of using a card. This never happens in Europe.

Visa and Mastercard have successfully lobbied and conspired with local banks in both countries to bury EFTPOS, which were national debit card payment systems with a flat transaction fee ranging between 10 and 50 cents per transaction (depending on the bank).

A while back, Visa/MC realised that debit card transactions, being on the rise, were a highly lucrative market to tap into that they had been missing out on, so they set out on a war of attrition and conspired with the local big banks to phase out EFTPOS cards in favour of Visa/MC debit cards, where the cost of transaction was to be passed on to the card user. Tiered debit cards quickly followed (Platinum, etc.), that attracted higher fee percentages for Visa/MC – payment network commission fees are published on the respective payment network websites. Other than consumers, all parties involved (big banks, payment networks) became moist with excitement at getting a huge slice of the card transactions pie.

But there is the light at the end of the tunnel (other than the light of the oncoming train) – the RBA has moved to ban all card surcharges from July 2026.

In the EU you can not charge a card fee on consumer transactions, so the merchant has the eat the cost.

If your revenue is - 2-3000 Eur a month, payment fees (and terminal subscription fees) can have a big impact.

If I were charging £3k/month, I'd be just above the threshold where paying £19.99/month to get a transaction fee of 0.99% saves money overall.

Additionally, and specifically in Sweden, the fees that banks charge businesses for handling cash (picking it up and depositing it at the end of each business day) have increased significantly in the last decade or two. This has been a significant factor in driving businesses away from cash - it's just expensive for them to deal with.

The US has a much less secure system specifically because there was much less credit card fraud in the US than in Europe.

Chip and PIN was an attempt to combat the rampant fraud in Europe.

It may be true at this point, I haven’t been tracking recently, but it wasn’t in the past.

So if you are a law abiding citizen you can easily be pissed off that you get to pay taxes and they don't.

For a few years "we don't take card" was widely interpreted as a strong indicator the merchant would evade taxes, and "I won't go there anymore" was a common reaction from some people. These days it's technically illegal and yet you will still find _some_ shops that only want cash.

That seems totally fair if they can’t pass that cost on to you for using a card. Why should they have to pay to accept your patronage?

And you didn’t answer why you shouldn’t pay that fee.

Managing cash has costs too, they're just harder to quantify: you have to ferry it to a bank, you have increased risk of theft, fraud, and robberies, you need extra time to actually check the register etc.

And then you risk losing business if you don't offer card payments because it's just more convenient for most customers (you may like wise lose some if you don't take cash, but that's a vanishing market).

That's what makes interchange and network fees so much more problematic than acquiring fees. There's very healthy competition between credit card acquirers and payment service providers on both features and price, but in the end, you have to accept whatever card your customer has or there won't be a transaction.

And you're mistaken if you think cash is cheaper for most stores. You risk theft (so need to pay for measures against that), you have straight losses from mistakes, have to spend time handling and counting cash, spend time depositing, spend time buying change, etc etc

Regarding cash, does your bank not charge a fee for depositing cash?

At this point the cost of handling cash is way higher than handling cards and as no one in Sweden ever uses cash its no longer relevant at all anyway. Now many (maybe even most?) dont accept cash to avoid the cost of handling cash instead.

(The fact that credit card networks continue doing business in Europe proves they're still profitable and the US is getting ripped off by these fees)

Paying for a used car in cash would actually be difficult because handling an amount greater than the equivalent of around USD $1k immediately starts tripping KYC/AML flags at any bank if you try to deposit it, and it's hard to use in day to day life because few places other than grocery stores even accept cash anymore.

Honestly, that system sounds a bit Orwellian. But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?

It's also worth noting that credit card interchange fees are price controlled in Europe; there's a EU directive that caps the interchange fees at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Because of this, cashback on credit cards is pitiful in the EU; you can get 0.5% cashback but not much more than that.

No, not at all. The Swish rails are free to users. But I've never had to pay any transfer fees for domestic transfers anyway. They are just much slower than using Swish (instant transfers) and much more clunky (bank account number etc. vs. phone number/QR-code).

It didn't have proper two-factor authentication when you just had to tap a button on the smartphone to approve a log-in or a bank transfer (and users didn't always tell which was which). Now it requires reading a QR code — which it should have done all the time.

AFAIK it still does not use any secure key storage on the smartphone, so if your phone gets rooted by an attacker, the attacker could gain access to your bank accounts. So far, frauds have been much easier to pull off, so criminals have not bothered to hack it. (that we know of)

1. BankID always allowed to have different settings for login and for signature. I have done that since forever. For example, I configured login to allow biometrics but not signature. If it's forcing me to enter the security code I know it is a signature, which forces me to pause. I cannot sign anything by mistake (like a transfer) because I'm forced to enter my long security code to complete it. And for the much more frequent scenario of pure logins, I can just use my finger.

2. I believe it does use the hardware-backed keychain if the device has one. I cannot prove it as the source code is not available, but I remember being curious and checking this on a rooted device.

I have barely used cash in 25 years. This doesn't mean anything at all. You're probably putting this solely in the context of using cash for significantly large purchases, e.g. higher 4 digit sum or above, or as in your example a craftsman who want to exempt it from his or her accounting. Nobody bats an eye at a person buying groceries, or some gadget for a couple of hundred, with cash.

You are spewing complete nonsense.

Here's some perfectly normal stuff I use cash for in sweden on the regular:

- flea markets

- strawberry stand by the road

- unmanned vegetable shop has a cash bin and a pay-for-what-you-take sign

But I do see people paying with cash in supermarkets etc, and I don't judge them as criminals. Some people just prefer to manage their money that way.

I got caught out by a thing like this, recently. (I'm on the east coast of the US.)

My kids had a day off from school, and it was a nice day to ride bikes. There's a small municipal park around 5 miles (8 km) away, with a nice mini-golf course and a grill/cafe next to it. They were eager to go by themselves, so I told them they could ride their bikes there and gave each kid enough cash for a round of mini-golf, a cold drink and some lunch.

The park was card only! While that has been happening more and more, I was not expecting that from a city park. Thankfully, they're not shy kids, and they persuaded one of the park employees to use a personal card in exchange for cash. But I was shocked. They're 10 and 13 years old... it had not previously occurred to me that I should give them cards of any kind.

But yeah you still give cash to kids.

But you've reminded me of a case I still use cash: on business trips abroad with a mixed group of people from several countries, most people put money on the table to pay their share.

I feel sorry for you and those people.

Tradespeople sometimes request cash payment or provide a good discount for cash payments (well above any fee they would be charged). I guess where you are no one considers this dubious (really???) but at least in discussions with family the feeling is that the request for cash only payment is dubious.

We also have a local retail establishment that is cash only. I think it's looked at dubiously.

I personally have experienced it. Someone wanted to split payment on something between cash and a check so they could report the value of the item was lower because it would save them taxes every year. Again, the use of cash was I think a bit dubious.

Note: Cash allows you to avoid all sorts of obligations (tax / family support / debt collection and garnishment etc etc), ineligiblity for banking (europe is pretty strict in some cases for example with folks with no legal status with banking) and is still used in things like the drug trade. Even if everyone around you considers large cash transactions reasonable that might be naivety or they may simply not have been exposed to larger cash transaction activity.

I do like and carry cash.

https://archive.ph/v7TRe

Cash is the ultimate privacy payment.

I don't love the law, but having cash on its own is not grounds for seizure. Having expensive goods that you cannot explain how you managed to pay for is what they are targeting, according to your source.

This is basically a law that takes your expensive shit away if you are too stupid to launder your ill-gotten cash.

By the way, have you ever wondered what the definition of "expensive goods" is? Of course, the powers that be want to make it all about the Rolexes and Lamborghinis, but a cursory peek at the actual law reveals [1]:

> Section 4 If the property has been seized and the value of what may be confiscated does not exceed one tenth of the price base amount according to Chapter 2, Sections 6 and 7 of the Social Insurance Code, a question about confiscation of the property may be examined by 1. a police officer, or 2. another employee of the Police Authority or the Security Service appointed by the respective authority.

Which effectively means that using the "price base amount" value of ~59k SEK in 2025, you are subject to asset forfeiture at the whims of any police officer once you have more than 600 bucks in your wallet or under the mattress.

But I'm sure they will only use it on brown gang bangers or knife wielding foreign drunks and not law abiding citizens such as myself, so it's fine!

[1] https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...

You said: "Sweden has introduced civil asset forfeiture where the mere possession of cash can make you a suspect." in a conversation about cash in Sweden, and posted an article about how there is a law that allows police to seize goods in certain circumstance.

I pointed out that cash != luxury goods.

I already said it was a law I don't agree with. But it also isn't a law that says that police can just take cash from you according to your sources . The section that you quoted doesn't seem to support your assertion about cash either, but I need the rest of the context.

In reading the law it is allowed to seize cash under very specific circumstances, but simply possessing cash is not enough evidence to seize it.

Cash seizure ("penningbeslag") can be used in an investigation concerning independent forfeiture ("utredning om självständigt förverkande").

The initiation of an investigation and the use of "penningbeslag" are contingent on the "reason to assume that property originates from criminal activity." This implies that merely possessing cash, without any connection or suspicion of it being linked to criminal activity, would not be sufficient grounds for seizure under this law. There needs to be an antecedent suspicion that the cash is proceeds of crime.

An investigation for independent forfeiture should be initiated "if there is reason to assume that property originates from criminal activity" (2 kap. 2 §). The purpose of such an investigation is to "investigate whether the property originates from criminal activity" (2 kap. 1 §).

Therefore, the primary circumstance for cash seizure is when there is reason to believe that the cash originates from criminal activity.

> You can put lipstick on a pig all you want, but if you reverse the burden of proof from "we have to prove your money is dirty" to "you have to prove your money is clean", that is a very clear cut case of "possessing cash is grounds for seizure" to me.

Swedish law does not describe such a reversal for the initial act of seizure or investigation. As previously discussed, the law states: "En utredning om självständigt förverkande ska inledas om det finns anledning att anta att egendom härrör från brottslig verksamhet" (2 kap. 2 §). This means there must first be a "reason to assume" that the property (including cash) originates from criminal activity before an investigation is initiated and seizure measures like "penningbeslag" (cash seizure) are applied.

> Section 4 If the property has been seized and the value of what may be confiscated does not exceed one tenth of the price base amount according to Chapter 2, Sections 6 and 7 of the Social Insurance Code, a question about confiscation of the property may be examined by 1. a police officer, or 2. another employee of the Police Authority or the Security Service appointed by the respective authority.

This section, "Beslut om förverkande" (Decisions on forfeiture), discusses who can decide on the forfeiture of already seized property (beslag or penningbeslag) if its value is below a certain threshold. It pertains to the administrative decision to forfeit after the property has already been seized based on the criteria in 2 kap., not the criteria for the initial seizure itself.

When I joined my gamedev studio I had colleagues asking me why I had cash, and many of them didn’t even recognise what it looked like (there was a switchover of the notes a year or two prior).

There was an insinuation that I would use it for drugs. So, I suspect that the parent is right here.

Add.: another poster suggested that someone had a bit of a laugh with you by saying it, which is also entirely possible. Basic joke.

See also: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48993008

which as well as explaining the background to the note and debates over whether it should be taken out of circulation also points out the context the average British adult was making about 20 cash transactions a month as of 2018 (none of them involving £50 notes)

A friend's dad showed me one when I was at school - that's it. He seemed amused I hadn't seen one before, then after making a minor show of it, as if it was some precious, rare item, said he'd never previously seen one either. They've been uncommon my whole life, and apparently could/can be difficult to actually use, shop assistants being unfamiliar with them and not confident in their legitimacy.

I expect today most people would use bank transfers for the sort of sum where the sheer number of notes would make a £50 one useful.

But when the bill is £45, there's no problem anyway.

I felt like I was very cool considering how rare they are.

(Maybe they're a bit easier to get hold of now, especially with recent inflation? But I don't use cash as much as I did when I was younger.)

I have had many places reject $100 bills though.

I’m that weirdo that tries to pay cash for most everything, so sample size is large and across a diverse set of businesses.

Due to what I tend to pay cash for these days (lunches, drinks with a friend, etc.) and prices being what they are, they are rapidly becoming my “go-to” denomination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_five-hundred-dol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-thousand-dol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_five-thousand-do...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_ten-thousand-dol...

Your best bet of happening into a $50 is if you go to a bank for an in-person withdraw and they ask you for preferred denominations. Generally the money is dispensed in $20s even there unless specified.

Your second best bet would be if you're selling something "on the side" and the purchaser uses a $50 in a transaction, which I would say is also rare these days, most people use Venmo or equiv.

Your best bet of handling a $50 is probably as a bartender, or of course as a bank teller.

I have held $50s a few times in my life, and even my reaction is "huh, a $50, don't see those often"

Nowadays that's less common from tourists from Europe, but tourists from Asia are still likely to bring cash.

Let me introduce you to a $2 note.

They are effectively becoming the new $20 with inflation continuing upwards, and I expect their popularity to continue to increase.

I believe them. Cash machines dispense(d) them, but usually only if you withdraw 1000DKK or more in a single transaction. That's unusual for people that rarely use cash.

I had them as I was following the official advice to keep some cash around in case the banking system is hacked etc, but I spent them and withdrew 100DKK notes when the advice was updated to point out that if everyone had only 500DKKs at home it wasn't very flexible.

I am slightly ashamed to realise that my banking app shows I haven't made a cash withdrawal in Denmark for more than 12 months — the second part of the official advice is to use cash occasionally to keep that system working.

No insight provided nor sources.

Just an opinion, a strong assertion, confidently stated with a tone of superiority.

Swedish here. The impression is common. Sweden is a small country and has long had a fairly cohesive culture. The culture has decided that digital payments are the way. Deviation from the collective way is always suspect.

Swedish here, too.

Your impression is misguided. Maybe it's the norm in Stockholm, but 80% of the population live elsewhere. We do use cash and nobody thinks its suspicious to pay with cash, stop making stuff up.

No.

Depends. Very long time ago I was approached by a group of seemingly friendly people asking for direction, then I felt sharp object to my belly and they told me to walk slowly towards cash point. They said they'll stab me if I don't withdraw all money I can. So I did. When cards were not popular, I would have small amount of cash in the wallet and anything more substantial hidden in a sock or elsewhere. Thieves would take what would be comfortable for me to lose. I guess it can be the same with cards - have a card with small amount and actual card hidden, but it is not as easy to hide as cash. Then you have whole other kettle of fish - banking apps. There's been instances of people being forced to do transfer at knifepoint. For that reason I don't use any apps, apart from throwaway bank account - again with small balance just in case. Shame more banks are restricting web access, which I think is most secure.

Wow. What country is/was that?

Cash is simply not used anymore by normal people.

Electronic payment (including between friends) just works here. It is easier and faster to pay with mobilepay than to use cash.