OT: inconsiderate shoppers

[gfretwell]

I agree. As long as it is all electronic, they are all about the same. You are just paying for the computers and the software.

[gfretwell]

Same here. ID's, pay with a check most of the time and cameras everywhere.

[gfretwell]

That just means they roll that 2% they pay into the price for everyone. It has been illegal to charge extra for credit cards here for years but sometime there is a cash discount.

[Rod Speed]

We have in fact just recently banned them from doing more than passing on the charge they get slugged by their bank. In other words they can't slug you more than the bank charged them.

Wrong again, most obviously when it costs them more to handle cash than their bank charges them in the transaction fee.

Not necessarily. It costs a lot to have the armoured car show up with bags of money and take the cash away etc.

Not necessarily.

Things have moved on from that now.

[Rod Speed]

You havent seen how much better the ducks would have been if they had not been fed that shit white bread.

[gfretwell]

If that is true, you are right., Credit card fees are based on a percentage of the transaction. Debits are a fixed rate per transaction. (in the US) That actually seems upside down to me since a credit transaction opens the opportunity to get into that double digit interest rate if people can't pay the bill right away but nobody said bank rates will make sense.

[Steven Watkins]

When you say technically a credit transaction, surely that's only very v= ery short term?

[Steven Watkins]

e

:

In the UK, shops are not charged for debit at all (I think - I'm basing = this on small shops that used to charge for credit card purchases but no= t debit card purchases).

But the banks have to produce that money for a while. Imagine you had t= o lend thousands of people money for 1 month. You have to produce all t= hat capital.

P.S. Why do you keep deleting one of the groups this is posted to? What= gives you the right to abandon half the people in the conversation?

[gfretwell]

[gfretwell]

They are making anywhere from 1% to almost 2.5% on that money in the first month you don't pay and the same every month until it is paid off (max 29.9% a year). Enough people carry a balance to make credit cards a very profitable line of credit for the bank. They want to make it easy to spend more than you can afford to pay and hope you keep sending them that minimum payment that barely covers the interest. That $400 TV might end up costing you $1000, more if you miss a payment.

I simply do not crosspost all over usenet.

[Rod Speed]

Problem with contactless is that there isnt any way to have the card holder indicate whether it should be done as a credit or debit transaction. No equivalent of the selection you get when you insert the card, before you enter the PIN.

Yes, the account itself could specify that but currently it doesn't because the entire industry is very incremental in nature and debit cards are very much an afterthought, essentially because cards are an invention of the credit card industry. The industry moves surprisingly slowly, the yanks still mostly don't have chip and pin, still stuck with magnetic stripe cards.

Basically card transactions are card and human driven and all the machine does is ask if those funds or enough credit is available in the account the card is linked to.

Yes, the card could have a credit/debit flag, but then you wouldn't be able to specify other than the default with a contactless transaction with now way to indicate that you want other than the default. So they default to a credit transaction and that's fudged for debit cards.

[Rod Speed]

Wrong. Its just a much lower charge.

That's because it's a much lower charge. Not because its zero.

Nope, not money is produced.

Banking doesn't work like that.

Its automatic with some usenet clients.

Plenty are that arrogant.

[Rod Speed]

I get paid 3% and its all federally insured. Australia.

[Rod Speed]

The difference is that the marginal cost is very close to zero with cash, but not with electronic transactions.

[Clare Snyder]

Up here it costs more to deal in cash than in debit, and more yet in credit - for the merchant. You have to factor in the labour time to deal with the cash - both the float and the deposit. Once the card is processed there is nomore expense to the merchant. No counting, no rolling coins, no trip to the bank, and no cash deposit fees.

[Clare Snyder]

Doesn't work that way here. (well it does, sort of, for me, because they have my information on record and just need my licence plate number) every transaction is recorded

[Wayne Boatwright]

On Fri 02 Nov 2018 10:50:19p, Rod Speed told us...

We deal with several retailers who pass along a 2% savings on all cash transactions. Customers using plastic pay the 2%.

[Tim Streater]

Not for a dog. Being stupid, dogs will happily gob it down if they get a chance. And then be very ill. So much for your notion that animals don't eat things harmful to them.

I notice you keep ignoring evidence. Not much of a physicist are you, more a religious nutter.

[gfretwell]

Handling cash is nowhere near zero cost. The biggest issue is what you have to do to prevent theft (and actual theft) but cash still needs to be counted, accounted for, securely stored and taken to the bank. Electronic transfers avoid most of this. Once a business gets used to automatic electronic payments, cash starts seeming pretty primitive to them. To start with, clerks need to know how to make change. OTOH cash does allow a certain amount of tax avoidance but that only works for small shops. Large chains have a harder time hiding cash because it has been counted and put in a ledger somewhere.

[Rod Speed]

Yes, that's why car hire and all but the absolute dregs of hotel/motels wont even accept cash anymore.

And the cost of getting the armoured car to show up and cart the cash back to the bank etc.

We even have a very few cafes that wont accept cash at all anymore, because its so much easier to have the payments all done electronically.

And no risk of the place being looted overnight either.

Oddly enough tho, some of the most vulnerable like taxis don't just refuse cash, presumably because so many of those who use them don't have anything else even tho they mostly get their welfare electronically now.