OT: Drawing cash with no branch

The only place I use cash these days is in the laundrette, which doesn't take cards.

In our case it's the chinese takeaway that *only* does cash and our cleaner, who strangely doesn't have one of those little machines.

Laundrette? Interesting... Is it cost effective to use one?

Bill

My washing machine broke down, but having a service wash done at the laundrette is so much easier that I've not bothered to replace it. If I price my time at the rate I did when working, it is probably very cost effective.

I withdraw cash from bank machines to do inexpensive fund transfers from my US banks to my UK one. That's not possible at the PO, our local bank closed a few years ago, and the nearest ATM is 40 miles away.

Our banks which have no physical branches allow you to use any ATM and all the major supermarkets to get cash and rebate the foreign ATM fee.

I have already decided that. I only use it for garage/car boot sales now. While I can pay any mobile number, it isn't worth the hassle of convincing the seller that it is as good as cash when they have a queue of people waiting to pay for something.

We rediscovered laundrettes on two 'road trip' holidays in the US and Canada. Fantastic f-off sized machinery, neat, clean and tidy, some with bookcases full of reading material. Also, some of the best quality and fastest free WiFI I've ever used. I used them to back-up all the photos we'd taken to Dropbox

yes for DIY-ing stuff like down double duvets that don't fit in domestic machines. Though they're getting hard to find even in deprived areas of inner London

They collect and return?

No, but dropping off and picking up are things I do on my way past to do other things, usually shopping, so that adds perhaps a minute or two to my trip.

I pay my cleaner by bank transfer. I parted company with my previous cleaner when she said, after many years of cheque/transfer payment, that in future she wanted paying in cash. I decided that I wasn't going to make sure that I always had sufficient cash in hand to pay her. It wasn't the response that she expected. It's over a year since I've used an ATM. The small amount of cash that I carry is from selling stuff on Gumtree.

On 19 May 2022, Tim Streater wrote

Although that's usually a definite flag to the tax-man, there's an anomaly in my town -- a local, independent, family-run caff* that's still entirely "cash only".

I'm fairly sure it's not dodging tax: it opened in 1982; is locally well-known; and I'd have thought that if there was tax-fiddling going on, the odds are pretty good that a disgruntled customer or staff member would have shopped them to the tax or VAT man at some point over the past 40 years.

ObAUE. *It's definitely a caff, not a café.

On 20 May 2022, HVS wrote

-snip-

Oops; sorry. I forgot which group I was posting this to.

Why, then, do you think? A couple of local small businesses round me only take cash - 'machine's broken' in one for the past 5 years.

If it's not tax, I thought perhaps no wifi and unreliable mobile signal?

Or perhaps all the hassle of PCI Security Standards Compliance that goes with accepting cards.

Too cheap to pay for a machine.

You don't need either to be able to take more than just cash.

If a retailer is using a payment gateway in accordance with instructions there's no PCI obligations on them. However there is a %age fee ....