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The Rainbow Vegetarian Café in Cambridge, England, has announced that it will not accept the new £5 polymer notes, introduced by the Bank of England in September. Last week the British vegan community discovered that the notes contain trace amounts of beef tallow, which is animal fat, and are therefore unacceptable by their cruelty-free standards. A heated online controversy has resulted, including a petition asking the Bank to remove tallow from the polymer.
The Rainbow Café's owner, Sharon Meijland, told The Telegraph that her stance was announced last Wednesday, at the end of a BBC radio interview on the unrelated topic of Christmas food.
"We sponsor the Vegan Fair and announced on Wednesday we would not be accepting the £5 notes because they are dubious ethically. We have been providing food for vegans for 30 years and have tried to be as ethical as we possibly can...This is not just a restaurant, it's a restaurant where tiny details like this are really important."
Is any of our money cruelty-free?
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:32PM
Accepting credit cards requires you to be set up to do so, which necessitates paying a credit processing fee. Accepting money is virtually zero effort.
While I'm not going to dispute other things you say, that latter statement is problematic. Accepting cash most certainly requires significant effort and resources, which most studies (and businesses) generally estimate to be roughly 1-2% of the transaction costs. Cash creates overhead because small businesses have to stock enough cash for change, which will require you to often get such cash from the bank and transport it (safely). There's the safety issues involved in storing cash and then transporting it TO the bank for deposit, which may incur costs for safes and other security (perhaps even armored car transport, if your business is large enough). Of course this is all because of the risk of robbery. And there is the additional labor involved in "balancing the register" each day and concern about theft from employees as well. Etc.
It's generally NOT as expensive as credit card fees for merchants, but accepting and processing cash transactions most certainly is more than "zero effort."