Cash Comeback

[jeff_duntemann]

During the five weeks I recently spent in the Chicago area, I saw something that I hadn't seen before: Retailers with a cash-only policy-and a small ATM by the front door. Although I have been slouching toward credit card use over the years, I have also run a small business, and I know that in

Comments

Cash Comeback

[anonymous]

I would dispute that we are moving back to cash.

Firstly, if everyone started drawing out of ATMs for everything the ATMs would either run out very quickly or would need refilling much more frequently; an extra cost burden that has to be charged to someone right :-)

Secondly, so many people are spending more than they actually have that they could not just draw the money out of their bank account because it is not in there in the first place.

[etfb]

IANAR (I Am Not A Retailer) but as far as I know, in Australia the system's much better. If you're using one of your bank's ATMs, there's no transaction fee for taking money out (unless you do it more than some minimum number of times per month). If you're using another bank's ATMs, there's a $1.50 charge (that's Aussie dollars; about a poofteenth of a cent US, most days). If you're buying something using EFTPOS (that's Electronic Fund Transfer at Point Of Sale, just in case it's not a common expression outside Oz) you have the same fees, but they come out of your account, not the retailer's. That is, if I'm using a Westpac Bank EFTPOS machine to buy a $20 item, my Commonwealth Bank card gets debited $21.50. People around here accept this as a natural consequence of the fact that banks are the bloated, scabrous, verminous spawn of Satan, and we don't think about it

[anonymous]

To add to eftb's comment as I'm also in Oz - I had to go read the Wikipedia article on EFTPOS to discover that it's not as ubiquitous in the US as here. As that article states, EFTPOS is so much the norm here that a retailer that doesn't accept would be expected to advertise the fact or face unhappy customers.

Dominic