Under Pressure, Amazon Plans To Accept Cash at Cashierless 'Go' Stores (cnn.com) 171
Bowing to growing pressure from opponents who say that cashless stores leave out low-income Americans, Amazon plans to take cash at its 10 cashierless "Go" stores. From a report: Amazon Go stores, located in San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, use AI and cameras to check out customers. Amazon reportedly is considering opening up to to 3,000 by 2021. "We are working to accept cash," a spokesperson for Amazon said Wednesday. "Paying cash at Amazon Go will work as you would expect: you'll check out, pay with cash, and then get your change." Amazon did not say when Go stores will begin accepting cash. Amazon also said its bookstores will start taking cash, but did not share any details.
Steve Kessel, Amazon's senior vice president of physical stores, told employees last month that Go stores would add "additional payment mechanisms," CNBC reported earlier on Wednesday. Kessel was responding to a question about how Amazon plans to address "discrimination and elitism" at cashierless stores, according to the report. Further reading: As More Retailers Ban Paper Money, It's Making Things Awkward For Customers Without Plastic.
Steve Kessel, Amazon's senior vice president of physical stores, told employees last month that Go stores would add "additional payment mechanisms," CNBC reported earlier on Wednesday. Kessel was responding to a question about how Amazon plans to address "discrimination and elitism" at cashierless stores, according to the report. Further reading: As More Retailers Ban Paper Money, It's Making Things Awkward For Customers Without Plastic.
Re:Low-income Americans are holding us back. (Score:5, Insightful)
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We should harvest their... water
Hey, Genius: most of us prefer that our showers not be golden.
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Most of us don't shop for drugs ... so cryptocurrency is rather worthless to us.
My drugs guy has a strict cash only policy.
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FTFY.
Prevasive tracking (Score:5, Interesting)
Just consider the power VISA would have if there was no ready alternatives to paying with VISA. Without alternatives they would have an effective power to implement VAT-like tax on everyone worldwide. At least for now, ability to pay with cash keep them in check - if they get too greedy merchants would stop accepting plastic.
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If Visa (or MasterCard for that matter) become too greedy, merchants will simply only accept bank cards (as many already do). A credit card transaction can cost upwards of 2%. Bank card transactions are almost free these days (and have always been cheaper than credit cards).
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I have never seen a "bank card" without the Visa or MasterCard logo. In America, a "bank card" is a "debit card". You have to fight tooth and nail to get a "bank card" that isn't a debit card, and in many cases they're incapable of providing such a thing.
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I agree with the "pervasive tracking" sentiment but not for the same reason... I suspect Amazon doesn't like that it's harder to track cash-paying customers and any products they buy, touch or even pause near in the store... That sort of data on individual buying behavior is invaluable... especially if they connect individual in-store purchasing habits to their online purchasing habits.
Also, I don't believe any excuses that technology to accept and dispense cash automatically is not ready. Most grocery stor
Re:Prevasive tracking (Score:4, Interesting)
Japan did it right. For various reasons they were very, very slow to accept credit cards. It is not uncommon for people to spend the equivalent of several thousand USD in cash for large purchases. When convenience was desired for small purchases, prepaid cards came into the picture that had nothing to do with credit cards and could be refilled for cash at kiosks located in department stores, train stations, hotels, etc. They can be anonymous or registered with a protected balance, are tied to rewards programs, etc. The end result was the big credit card companies had to beg merchants to accept their cards, and you're still much more likely to find EDY or a transit pass accepted at a merchant or vending machine than you will a credit card.
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Just consider the power VISA would have if there was no ready alternatives to paying with VISA.
I do wonder what stretch of the imagination converts cashless to mean VISA, or even single company, or even single technology for that matter.
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illegal use of apostrophe
plurals don't use a fucking apostrophe
end of
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Common argument, doesn't work. If you don't agree to pay credit, the store refuses to sell to you. Store refuses to sell to you (and a store can always refuse to sell to you, unless you can show illegal discrimination), there's no debt, so no use pointing to the "all debts" words on your cash.
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(and a store can always refuse to sell to you, unless you can show illegal discrimination)
Refusing to accept cash would disproportionately affect a certain protected class in the area. Therefore even though it's completely fair, makes no determination based on a protected class, etc., it's still illegal. See building codes in the death trap tinder boxes in San Francisco.
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That is not, in and of itself, illegal. In such cases, the store has to show that a) the policy is not directly targetted at the protected class (which it clearly is not) and b) there is a legitimate business reason for the policy (which they'd have to convince a court of).
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Sure, that argument works if you have a contract (for example at a restaurant), it doesn't really work at typical retail store where they can just say "nope, we're not selling you the stuff".
Legally it has been deemed to mean court judgments (private) and taxes/fines/etc (public).
The "low-income" excuse (Score:4, Insightful)
When a 16-year old with no more than a side gig cutting laws can obtain a free checking and savings account, to include the debit/credit card, can someone please explain this "low-income" excuse?
Perhaps instead of "low-income" you call it what it is; Citizens wanting to hide their legal status by being paid under every proverbial table.
Yeah, I like semi-anonymous transactions and privacy too, but they're not doing this for "high-privacy" Americans...
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Do you understand why "if you have nothing to hide..." argument is flawed? Well, your "Paid under every proverbial table." is exactly the same.
Do you understand that citizens living in a country illegally fail to meet the criteria of "nothing to hide"?
No, not "exactly" the same. At all. There's a reason we're talking about a small fraction of society here.
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What about children getting their money from a side gig?
Sure I guess they could file their taxes, but that's not usually how a side gig works.
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Oh, so it's a matter of how large a fraction of society is affected? The fraction you're not part of, I'd bet.
Every legality and illegality is a matter of public acceptance. Alcohol was illegal at one time, and then it was made legal again because that fraction of society grew large enough. The public stance on marijuana is another example of fractions changing laws.
Get the vast majority of people to support your stance, and make your illegal activity, legal. Until then, understand that people breaking the law to this extent will always represent a fraction of society, simply because the vast majority of citize
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Paying with cash is quite far from illegal activity, it is actually quite the opposite - it is explicitly legal as it is mandatory to accept all legal tender.
You are also now claiming that there is consensus on banning cash, and that it is somehow immoral to pa
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Discrimination against people who aren't like you.
Too bad people who "aren't like me" can still get a CCP in Texas; otherwise you might have a point.
I can (Score:5, Insightful)
Once the world kicks down you it doesn't stop. Unless some outside force steps in you're pretty much done with. As for the illegals, they've got their own little world that still takes cash that they keep to. Everyone knows they're there but turns a blind eye because the local businesses want to hire them and the locals themselves want their lawns maintained and their houses renovated on the cheap. This has nothing to do with illegal immigration. We could stop that any time we want with stricter employer guidelines and by ending the drug war so the refugees would stop streaming in. But if we did that the right wing in America would lose yet another boogeyman to scare us with.
Unsolvable Problems (Score:3)
Yeah, there's a reason everything seems to be an endless battle - even when one party has total control and a concrete agenda, they blow it. An American politician can do too much and cause a disaster or do too little and say, "We'll get it right next time if you vote for me," thus it pays for them to be as ineffective as possible.
We will never solve any issue that we care about. Instead, our politicians will continue to fight a forever-war over meaningless bandaids and half-measures while promising it will
Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
We've been trying right wing politics for decades, whichever party was in charge. Folks have been trying to replace "The Establishment" without being able to understand who the establishment is.
Go look up opensecrets.org [slashdot.org]. That's a good place to start. Watch Secular Talk and Shaun [youtube.com]. Read A People's History of the United States [historyisaweapon.com]. Listen to what Bernie Sanders says about healthcare and what Liz Warren says about the banks. Do these things and it'll start to make sense. The problem is a wealthy elite who's greed and power hunger knows no bounds. You can't just look at parties or politician or who makes you feel good about yourself. What matters is policy and who does [commondreams.org] and doesn't [justicedemocrats.com] take corporate PAC money. Oh, and watch out for guys like Beto O'Rouke, who seems to have gotten his money from the wealthy and hide that fact by having them bundle small donations.
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Cool story, but why would that situation mean he can't get a savings account with a debit/credit card?
Do Americans actually charge for these? Do for some reason you need to have a good credit rating to pay with debit over VISA?
If so the problem here isn't credit, the people or the cashless concept.
If your credit score falls below a certain level (Score:2)
My understanding is large parts of Europe have "Postal Banking" where you can open a public bank account at a Post Office regardless of
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I just opened a credit union account for $25. My friend with a very poor credit score was able to get a debit card from one with no issues either.
When I was a teenager and had no established credit, they offered me a secured credit card. I had to put $1k in the account and my credit limit was the same $1k.
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>When a 16-year old with no more than a side gig cutting laws can obtain a free checking and savings account, to include the debit/credit card, can someone please explain this "low-income" excuse?
Uh....
Minimum balance to have a free checking account with debit and credit card is either a minimum of $5000 cash in the account, otherwise it's $31 per month. Without a credit card drops down to $16/month, or a $4000 minimum balance. If you're disciplined and careful to limit the number of transactions per month to less then 12then the price drops to $5 per month or $2000 minimum balance. If you're a full time student or under 18, then you can have those fees waived.
These are the best rates that I'm aware of for banking here. Other places are either more expensive for less, or less expensive but come with some pretty significant drawbacks.
I can sorta understand where you're coming from with the 16 year old but what about a 22 year coming out old prison with no assets?
Those rates are absolutely insane. Find another bank. Or more importantly, understand why people prefer a credit union.
I just checked the fine print at my credit union. If you have at least 5 debit transactions a month (no maximum limit) and at least one direct deposit transaction a month, then your checking account is free (including debit/credit card). No minimum balance required. If you fail to meet those requirements, then they charge you $5/month. Not exactly fees that should alienate or deter a
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And also, even a single transfer from a PayPal account will usually count for the direct deposit requirement.
My main CU has a monthly cash back reward of something like 2% on the checking account and 2.5% on savings (based on the balances of the accounts) if you meet their simple requirements. 12 card swipes with the bank card (can be as either debit or credit), receive your statement electronically, and either one bill pay or direct deposit each month.
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My bank refused to give me a non ATM card until I was 18.
Also, free accounts have been inching up their minimum balances since they've started consolidating.
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Here's an idea: walk into a grocery store and buy an Amazon gift card for any amount from $25 to $500 (need one for $29.73? Yeah, you can do that). Now you don't need a credit or debit card at the Amazon store.
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Strange how you qualified your statement so specifically.
Yes, lots of banks offer "student" accounts with no monthly fee for young people, but it only lasts until a certain point.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have to keep a minimum balance over a certain amount to get the monthly fee waived. More and more Americans can't maintain an average balance at that point, thanks to the growing wealth inequality in the country.
So, not sure if you're trying to create a strawman or what. Or was this an anti-immigrant rant,
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scenario 1
Not enough money coming in, account eventually gets overdrafted and closed. You owe the bank money. No other bank will open an account for you.
scenario 2
you make enough money, but can't afford the float. You don't have direct deposit. if you deposit your paycheck, it will take 2+ days to clear. That's business days, so Friday deposit shows up next Wed.
Meanwhile, you can cash your check at the check wal-mart fo
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Bank accounts require you to maintain a minimum balance, usually a few hundred dollars. If you go below that, they start charging monthly fees. For a 16 year old living with their parents, locking up a few hundred dollars where they can't touch it might not be a big deal. For a lot of people living below the poverty line, it's not an option. They don't have the money to put aside. That means no bank accounts and no debit cards.
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How is this any different than Costco requiring that you have a membership to shop at their stores?
Costco doesn't let you IN the store unless you wave the membership card at them. Amazon lets you enter the store, spend a lot of time shopping, and then won't let you buy the stuff without having their form of payment.
It's not really a "poor vs. rich" argument. It's a "have vs. have not". I got bit by one of these kinds of cashless stores a few months ago. I'm a visitor, don't have any local accounts of any kind. I need to buy lunch. I go into a nice little shop, pick up some food, and wind up at a machine
NJ Costco gas stations, pharmacy, alcohol (limmted (Score:2)
NJ Costco gas stations, pharmacy, alcohol (limited) states are buy law non member.
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Ironically buying food in bulk is one of the more affordable ways to shop for food, particularly for low income families.
You'd think so. But Costco's average customer has a household income over $100,000 [forbes.com].
Their customer base is the upper middle class, not the poor.
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I'm not surprised.
Buying in bulk requires space, and a car.
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Buying in bulk requires space, and a car.
It also requires planning ahead, and delayed gratification.
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Furthermore, most poor people can't afford to buy 6 months of soap at once. It's the cheapest way to buy, but only if you have enough excess cash flow. The opportunity cost of buying 6 months of soap is too high for many poor people.
In many places, buying your average american bottle is too expensive, that's why single serving sachets are so popular in poorer countries.
You can have my consumer info when you pay me (Score:2)
It's $2500 a transaction if you want it. Mmm, that's a tasty -$2498 candy bar!
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Two bucks, comrade
Low income people already covered (Score:2)
From watching a documentary last night, it seemed like many homeless in Seattle shoplift with impunity (and immunity) already. So it seems like they were already fine as they would just walk out of the store with items like every other customer.
and with no cash shoplifting is hard to enforce (Score:2)
and with no cash shoplifting is hard to enforce under the law.
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I can't recall the last time I saw a self checkout that didn't take cash. It had to have been way back in the early days of automated self checkout systems, when they were one of the best ways to check out fast (due to everyone else being unsure how to use them properly).
How does cashless exclude low income? (Score:2)
You don't have to have much money to have a bank account.... hell, I was on the verge of becoming homeless some 25 or so years ago and I still had a bank account. Granted, not much money was in it most of the time, but it was still there... and when I got paid, the money went in, and I'd pay everything electronically up until the money ran out... wash, rinse, repeat, every pay cycle. I lived like this for years.
I might carry cash maybe only one or two times a year today... but even back then I still ha
Re:How does cashless exclude low income? (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to have much money to have a bank account....
If you don't have much money and you have a bank account, pretty soon you will have no money.
I got a "free" $400 offer from a local bank. Deposit X dollars and we'll give you $400 for opening the account. Great deal. Until you find out there's a fee every month that you don't do a certain number of POS transactions with their card. (Hmmm. Not processing transactions costs money that justifies a fee? No, not giving them consumer demographics they can sell costs them money.) There's a fee if you want a paper statement. After just a few months (like 6) without the appropriate number of transactions, your account is deemed "inactive" and ... you pay a fee for that. And after a few more, your account is dormant and can be turned over to the state.
I needed an international money transfer, and did it through them. There was a $27 fee for that which nobody bothered to tell me about (I had to ask them multiple times for the secret codes so the other bank could send the money, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to tell me), and was not mentioned even on their international money transfer web information pages.
Banks are a rip-off. Poor people and banks have no common ground.
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The days of a "simple savings account" are long over. There are fees for everything - just go to a bank's website and try figuring out their account plans. If you ever thought your mobile carrier's plans were complex, bank account plans are even more so.
The cheapest of the cheap accounts (the ones with practically no monthly fee) only give you a pathetic amount of withdrawals - sometimes you can "earn" more if your company does a direct deposi
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That said, just did a domestic wire and there was a $10 or $12 fee. They were up front about the fee, however.
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Only if you are not very good at paying attention to exactly how your money is being spent.
A funny thing about being poor is that you end up learning how to really make every dollar stretch as absolutely far as it will go... and whether currency might be purely electronic with direct payment does not have to impede that.
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Only if you are not very good at paying attention to exactly how your money is being spent.
You might note that all the fees I mentioned have nothing to do with spending your own money, it's fees imposed by the bank for the simple privilege of having an account with them.
A funny thing about being poor is that you end up learning how to really make every dollar stretch as absolutely far as it will go...
The only way to avoid the fees is to have a "minimum balance", in some cases. Poor people have a really hard time keeping a "minimum balance" because you need to be "not poor" to have that much money sitting in the bank unusable.
For the person who provided "two words", yes, I spoke specifically about a bank because my normal CU h
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You might not have noticed that I specifically said that I have an account that does *NOT* charge any usage fees per transaction...
And you might not have noticed that I wasn't talking about your specific banking arrangements, and that I don't care about your specific banking arrangements. You might also not have noticed that I was not talking about transaction fees, but NON-transaction fees -- fees for NOT using a debit card. No, actually, it's not "might not have noticed", you completely ignored that.
so there are no "hidden" charges.
An "inactive account fee" that I was not told about when I created the account is both a "non-transaction fee" and hidden. While the tra
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That's funny... I thought we were talking about people on low income and its impact on the ability to use banking.
As I have definitely gone through a very long period of being low income, and this did not adversely affect my ability to use a bank, I figured that my experiences in the matter might be relevant. I watched how I spent my money, and I made sure to deal with insitutions that were favorable to my situa
Re:How does cashless exclude low income? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Plus cash is good, cash is private, we should all be doing our part to keep the cash economy humming along
I remember 20 years ago there was a tv special on about how the government is tracking you with your cash. There was a little metal strip in each bill, and the government was using that to tell how much you had on you when you went between those inventory theft detectors in stores.
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To the mod that labeled this as flamebait. There is nothing flamebait about this post. It is a simple statement of a story that I saw decades ago. In the figure you need to make sure you mod correctly for Slashdot moding system to work.
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One of the reasons I believe it is safe to call bullshit on this particular conspiracy theory. So what if they can tell that I walked past a scanner and have $200 in cash in my pocket. Unless.... they take my picture at the time, compare it to a database with facial recognition software, and then log it. I should run that by the tin foil hat group for shits and giggles.
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I know exactly how much I paid with direct payment as well... as I said, my bank account has no hidden fees per transaction, with the benefit that I don't have to carry cash around everywhere. Direct payment is accepted virtually everywhere locally for me, as well as most of the other places I have occasion to travel to. The only time I find direct payment to be less convenient is is when I travel to another country, and only then do I either need to carry either currency local to where I am travelling
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I know exactly how much I paid with direct payment as well...
After it happens and appears on your statement. It's hard to be overcharged even by accident when you hand someone the exact amount to cover the payment in cash, and the overcharge is limited to the amount you hand them if you don't have exact change. You can also immediately reconcile the charges with the change and see if the change is correct.
Also, I expect that the government and bank have more important things to do than monitor my pathetic spending habits anyways.
You could be wrong, and you are absolutely wrong when you include the vendor to whom you have handed a handy account number they can use to track your every purchas
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No... I know how much money I have because I can do math.
As for being billed the wrong amount... first of all, the machine expects me to acknowledge the amount I'm paying before I do anything. If the vendor passes me the machine after bypassing this verification, I will hand it back to them and tell them to punch it in again, because I want to verify the amount I am paying myself.
If I do not bother to ensure that they are billing me what I expect, how is t
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No... I know how much money I have because I can do math.
You don't know how much your payment actually turned out to be until you see the statement that tells you how much was taken out of your account. It has nothing to do with the ability to "do math". You can't do math on numbers you don't know.
As for being billed the wrong amount... first of all, the machine expects me to acknowledge the amount I'm paying before I do anything.
"Direct payment" covers a large number of operations. Not all of them include "machines".
then I can show the receipt to my bank when I discover the discrepancy,
And that's after the payment has been made -- which is what I wrote. And you claimed cannot happen.
It's not worth their time to bother to try because all it takes is one person to complain and their business is over.
Oh my God. You actually think an incorrect charge would be reason to close down a
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No, I think fraud would be a reason to press charges. If they claim to have charged me X, and the receipt shows X, but bank statement says that they charged me Y, I can show the receipt to the bank as evidence of deliberate fraud. In this case, it would amount to forging the receipt and tampering with the equipment that communicates with the bank to show something different than what is actually charged
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No, I think fraud would be a reason to press charges.
And all errors on an electronic charge are fraud.
I can do math on the numbers I am told I will have taken from my account...
Of course you can. And then you find out that the number they told you wasn't the number that came out. Or they didn't tell you the number they took out until the statement arrives. You do realize that automatic payments are done that way, don't you?
and I'm not going to authorize someone to take money from my account unless they do tell me in advance
And now we're back at your specific banking arrangements and how smart you are. My comment was about generic banks and generic poor people, not you specifically. Go back and read what I first wrote and look for w
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No...
THAT is fraud.
I don't authorize payments when I don't know the amounts ahead of time.
Because, funnily enough, I though that my own experiences with being poor and having no problems dealing with a bank just might qualify me to have an
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I have teenage grandchildren, so I'm objectively not young, and I never would have thought of myself as lucky, while I have had no particular reason to think my situation is unusual. I do not procrastinate on financial matters, I have disciplined myself to be cognizant of and responsible for the transactions that I enter into, and I make sure to read the fine print of any agreements I enter into with institutions such as banks. I know that if I failed to do even one t
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It's much simpler to stay on budget when you only have so much cash on hand to spend.
Even more important are the physical affects. Spend cash, both the pleasure and disgust areas of the brain light up, that disgust part slows down spending. Use a card, only the pleasure part of the brain lights up, making it easier to spend money and even leading to an addiction.
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You have the same amount of money either way... what difference does it make if it's physically in your pocket or not?
Speaking for myself, I've noticed that usually when I use a debit card, as soon as I press "OK" to confirm and complete the transaction, I have the distinct sense of the money I've just made getting sucked away. There is definitely some "disgust" goin
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For many people, it is easier to spend money with a card compared to watching cash disappear out of your wallet. It's going to vary by person.
The pleasure disgust thing is from studies of watching brain activity. Once again, everyone is different.
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and they can't enter an incorrect "tip" amount later
I don't understand. What is this "later" thing you speak of? Do you not see the fixed price on your machine before you enter your PIN?
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Cash is king (Score:4, Interesting)
noun
Denomination of a country's currency that, by law, must be accepted as a medium for commercial exchange and payment for a money debt.
Sounds to me like Amazon is making the right move. I don't see much room for interpretation for the definition of 'legal tender' here.
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Denomination yes. Physical piece of paper or metal as a respresentation of that denomination, no.
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must be accepted as a medium for commercial exchange and payment for a money debt. Sounds to me like Amazon is making the right move. I don't see much room for interpretation for the definition of 'legal tender' here.
Someone else has already pointed out for another comment like yours that it is your definition of "debt" that is in error. If the vendor refuses to sell to people who don't have cash, then there is no debt to start with. You walking up to a cashier station does not create the debt; you waking out the door with the merchandise does. If you walk out without paying FIRST then you are shoplifting.
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The dictionary is not a good source for determining the law. For that you could read the laws themselves, and no, legal tender does not need to be accepted as a medium for commercial exchange.
Legal tender in the USA only needs to be accepted to pay debts, debts also has a very specific meaning, and no you're not in debt between eating a meal in a restaurant and paying. Unless that restaurant made you sign a long legal contract explicitly stating the terms of the debt and its resolution. Then they would need
Shrinkage (Score:2)
Low-income shoppers steal. It's called shrinkage. They will thrive in a no-cash environment.
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Buying something can be cancelled by vendor or consumer, until the purchase or contract is complete. A vendor thus can refuse to take cash and cancel or refuse any transaction.
I too believe that every merchant should accept cash. I recently had an issue with U-Haul where literally they would not accept my debit card and only took credit cards. But there is definitely a difference betwee
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Cash, grass, or ass (where ass can refer to just physical labor of some sort in exchange for other goods and services, and not just the more traditional giggity definition.)