56
Australian businesses selling essential goods and services to be forced to accept cash payments
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
56 points (100.0% liked)
Australia
3582 readers
147 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cash is so gross though. All those grubby mitts all over it, plus being stored in super icky places like bras and grunderpants. Big fan of cashless if for no other reason than keeping bits of other people off me.
Actual other reasons:
I don't disagree with cashless being the preferred method, but cash should always be an option because e.g. in case of disaster, the infrastructure that cashless depends on can be impaired for a while.
As proved by various outages, when electricity (or the internet, or the service provider, etc) is down and prevents digital transfers being made... cash doesnt work either, cause it's all the same POS / accounting software that handles cash which is also down.
Also if a natural disaster takes out internet access for an extended period, wheres the cash a business needs to keep on hand going to suddenly appear from? I haven't worked in retail in a decade or more, but we always kept as little cash as possible on hand due to the constant threat of robbery. Even back then cash was way less than 50% of transactions, I'd be surprised if it was even in the double digit percentages anymore.
If you have pen and paper and the key to the drawer you don't need a working POS on the spot to accept cash while comms are out and record the transactions later.
And exactly: where does the cash appear from? That's the "should always be an option" part.
Of course there's drawbacks for everything: less secure for staff if you accept cash vs inability to do anything when comms fail if you don't.
There might be a further point, although I haven't looked into the reasons: Sweden started the cashless experiment before and they are backpedaling now.
and when the electricity is down you can shop at all
Agree with the bit about it being easier to keep track of payments with electronic payment.
Cash does have a cost, though it’s less visible.
It's a pain in the butthole tbh.
From a checkout chump perspective it was probably 40 minutes of my day wasted dealing with the cash. Getting it dispensed, double counting it all, depositing in to the safe when you had too much, watching out for dodgy currency or those dickheads who try the quick "I give you a 5 and you round up the change to 10 and then I'll swap that for a 20 and then give you 30 so I get a 50" scam, dealing with damaged or defaced currency, recounting at end of day, getting reamed for being too far up or too far down in the count, having to sign forms to swear to god you hadn't knocked off a pineapple (or put too many pineapples in the drawer)...
Then you need a safe storage space for the cash, security to protect the cash, literally a whole industry built on transporting it around the place, keep enough cash on hand to provide change, keep enough to cover EFT withdrawals.
There's a lot of cost to handling cash. Also its gross. Did I mention its gross yet? Getting warm notes that were slightly sticky was disgusting.