1142
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 114 points 11 months ago

Cash is king, we shouldn't be paying MasterCard and VISA for every purchase we make.

Case in point: when the UK left the EU, MC and VISA immediately increased their transaction fees from 0.3% to 1.5%.

[-] thehatfox@lemmy.world 50 points 11 months ago

Cash isn’t much use for making purchases online, which is also where an ever increasing amount of spending is done.

There’s no coin or note slot on my laptop, and contrary to the internet’s advice throwing money at my screen doesn’t seem to work either.

I used to be a big proponent of cash but with the bulk of my financial activity happening online now I can’t help it feeling a bit redundant.

[-] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 months ago

Cash is needed nonetheless because when there is a downtime for whatever reason, it is not good if the only thing you have is a card.

[-] ReadyUser31@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Retaining some ability to spend and use cash is vital because otherwise, all our financial transactions are totally controlled by the banks, and they are completely untrustworthy. The cost is inconvenience.

[-] SeekPie@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Mullvad lets you mail them cash, but I don't think it's scalable nor fast enough to be widely used.

[-] SpookyUnderwear@eviltoast.org 2 points 11 months ago

The last time I sent cash in the mail was in the early 00s when buying CDs from ebay. Wild that there is a service today that takes cash via mail.

[-] SeekPie@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

They do it to make it as anonymous as possible

load more comments (13 replies)
[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 21 points 11 months ago

Just saw a sign in my bakery today begging people to pay by card because getting small coins from the bank is hard and expensive.

TBF here in Belgium Bancontact has a local monopoly (about 1 % flat fee, no fixed cost per transaction; that seems fair and intuitively cheaper than holding, insuring, depositing cash, dealing with employees skimming off the top, of the time lost counting bills).

Also the government heavily incentivizes electronic payments because those can't be pocketed without paying VAT. That's a MONUMENTAL amount of tax fraud being chipped at by the progressive disappearance of cash.

[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago

That's the real crux, banks charge businesses to deposit cash. They do it in such a way that there's no way to escape their ever-increasing fee percentage.

The mattress solution is more and more appealing, imo.

Also the government heavily incentivizes electronic payments because those can’t be pocketed without paying VAT. That’s a MONUMENTAL amount of tax fraud being chipped at by the progressive disappearance of cash.

Unfortunately I think the amount of cash tax fraud that exists is far more reasonable than the amount of straight up fraudulent, yet "legitimate", expenditure that governments allow. See, for example, covid PPP loans.

[-] ElegantBiscuit@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

Write offs, PPP loans, deferrals, and all the other accounting tricks that the government carved out for the primary benefit of the wealthy are definitely a bigger loss of tax revenue. One guy writing off a personal vehicle for his personal business is probably what a busy restaurant makes in 4 months of cash purchases. Suppliers and distributors are also unlikely to deal with large volumes of cash just as a matter of practicality and risk, and the fact that you can’t have a functioning business with employees that need paychecks without going through banks which go through the government, unless you’re operating with an entirely under the table staff which is just begging for trouble.

[-] _danny@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Seems like an easy fix for a business, just change their prices so that they don't have to use coins. Make everything an integer number of dollars. If the items are too cheap to round up, encourage a three for two deal or something like that.

Sales tax doesn't change that frequently. It's easy for a business to predict and account for it when setting their prices.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 11 points 11 months ago

... the euros' lowest paper bill is 5€. 1 € and 2€ coins are bulky pieces of shit too.

And a bakery is the worst affected kind of business even if there was a 1€ paper bill. A loaf of good bread is 1.40€, if you round up it's way too expensive and if you round down they may not even make a profit. Can't exactly buy 3 loaves of bread either unless you got a family of 6 to feed.

[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

Unfortunatley that won't work, banks charge businesses a percentage for deposits.

[-] freebee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

The people insisting on using cash are the ones with a big pile of it, with origin dubious to unknown. Anti tax evasion is the best part of digital banking. Threats to privacy is the other side of that coin unfortunately...

[-] Azzu@lemm.ee 18 points 11 months ago

Honestly there should be governmental electronic cash with the same advantages as cash, i.e. no fees & no traceability.

[-] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

there are very easy free bank accounts to open.

Traceability is the tricky part.

[-] Azzu@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

The cost of a bank account has nothing to do with fees for electronic cash. Fees for electronic cash are collected per each transaction and are paid by the business you buy from. These huge fees are why businesses are slow to adopt electronic cash in Germany, they see no reason to pay 1%+ of their revenue to Mastercard or Visa or whatever.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Here in at least the state of California (not sure if this is country wide) those bank "convenience" fees are limited to no more than $1.50 by law.

[-] Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago

Yes cos California is little Europe and we love the modern thinking

[-] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

Are you talking credit card fees or bank transaction fees?

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 3 points 11 months ago

That fee charged for simply using your debit card at a POS.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

That's more of a California thing. They're talking about the fee charged by the CC company to the merchant, which is usually absorbed by the merchant. You're talking about businesses charging you extra for using your credit card, which I have only seen in California.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Icedrous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

My bank (RBC) charges me $2.50 after 10 or so free transactions, doubled if tapped.

I switched to Neo and I love it.

[-] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Re: credit card companies: you're right, and you're not the first to say it.

South East Asia is pissed off at them and their fees too. Starting in Thailand (but spreading) their big banks got together and made a QR code system for instant sending of money (similar to what Australia did with PayID which obfuscated bank account numbers with your own phone or email address, and stacked with Osko, a fast transfer system to bypass the slow (days) bank to bank transfers).

You will see street vendors with food carts with a QR code on it. You want to buy something? You order, they say the price, you scan the code, send the money, show your phone, get your food.

(You can have codes with the payment amount already in it, like in a bill, but since this is just a food cart on a sidewalk, they just have one generic "pay me" code)

Because they are bank to bank, it's all fee-free.

And yes, in the USA you have Venmo and similar, which has other issues, I think.

In the Philippines so many people use pay-as-you-go and prepaid phone plans, and load up their account with credit, they've gone further. People could gift credit to other people for a long time. Now, you can actually pay for things with your phone credit there. (GCash, which confused me for a Google product for a while). There's only two mobile/cellular phone companies in the country (all the rest are resellers), so it has some monopoly issues. But what it means is since everyone has a phone (doesn't have to be a smart phone. A nokia style dumb phone is fine), you don't need cash or to pay VISA/MC.

Cash is garbage. Using cash electronically is good.

Using credit card companies is dubious.

[-] Artyom@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago

If only there was some way of federating spending in a way that would make private credit card companies obsolete. I'm still confused how no one sees any future in block chain and just say "it's all a scam".

[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago

Block chain has become a buzz word, just like AI or NFT's, but they sure as hell makes some people a chunk of money before everyone realises what it actually means.

[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 months ago

because it doesn't work. case in point: it hasn't. It improves on one aspect, and regresses (very very badly) in every single other aspect.

[-] Prandom_returns@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago

Electronic is faster, more convenient, safer, easier to track, and doesn't need a stupid purse to carry around.

Haven't touched cash since 2020, couldn't be happier.

load more comments (22 replies)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
1142 points (95.5% liked)

memes

10154 readers
2296 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS