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Bluestone, which now has 20 stores in the U.S., went cashless last October.
A big reason: Nearly 90 percent of customers [...] never paid in cash.
Another reason: The lines move faster when employees don't have to make change.
"We see a lot of guests that pay for a meal with a credit card, but will always leave a cash tip. And I think people like doing that. People like palming a bartender a $20 or palming their server a $10. Palming the bus boy a couple bucks," said Fileccia.
There are also people, he said, who want to keep their meal off the books — if they're having an affair, for example.
No, businesses are not required to accept cash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender
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When The Cash Register Doesn't Take Cash
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Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:30AM (10 children)
Unless they have some seriously exotic payment equipment, lines now move slower. I swear, credit cards must go over a 50 baud modem to a 386 running Windows 95 that runs an S/360 emulator.
The real reason is one or both of:
1. tracking customers in a giant database
2. keeping out the riff raff undesirables, who might not have credit cards
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:38AM (2 children)
It may be a "race to the bottom" for all the other businesses.
Where I leave, the cards have a NFC chip and even the small coffee shop (kiosk size rather) of the train-station in the almost-countryside burb I'm living has contact-less POS terminals - great for the first sip of (awful) espresso I'm having in the morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:40AM (1 child)
Sorry, not NFC, RFID.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:21PM
TWO posts, TWO typos? ... did you mean "Mayberry R. F. D. " ?
You silly Goober.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:51AM (2 children)
I think it is due to the chips on cards. Each transaction has to be validated, rather than batch processing them.
It's quite noticeable that the chip-and-pin cards are processed much faster in the UK, where I believe batch processing is still allowed.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:53PM
Nope. All EMV (chip and pin or contactless) transactions in the UK are validated in realtime. Even the 50 baud that the grandparent suggests would probably be fine, because the total data exchanged in both directions is only a few hundred bytes. The problem is that the US was so late to the EMV party that everyone else realised it was a great opportunity to dump all of their ancient equipment. The UK was quite late, because our banks didn't want to pay to license a French patent, so waited 20 years until it expired. The US was about a decade later, and so got all of the crappy left-over or returned first-gen equipment. The US banks also have archaic back-end infrastructure, which doesn't help even for the businesses that do buy decent EMV terminals.
Contactless transactions in the UK take under a second, chip and pin is typically bottlenecked on entering the pin (so usually takes a second longer than it takes to enter a 4-6 digit pin).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by leftover on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:30PM
The entire purpose of moving to EMV cards was to provide an offline validation mechanism at the point of sale. It took off in Europe because the online infrastructure at the time was more spotty than it is now. Telephone line service (POTS) was widely available in the US and good enough for online validation so EMV never took off.
In both cases, the validation process is separate from the financial transaction. Clearing is done in batch form, up through the merchant banks and back down through consumer banks' card processors.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:09AM (1 child)
Have you been to Walmart recently? Not sure about where you are, but in Canada all CC payments were under 1 second in duration. Longest is when you are required to enter your PIN, but tap-and-pay is very fast.
Yes, although many do this via facial recognition now.
Then they can pay with debit? Or have those pre-paid CC that some employers use to pay them with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:39AM
Aka, when they are pretending[1] to care about security. As in, the rest of the time they don't even pretend, there is no security at all.
[1] We've started moving from 8 chars [a-zA-Z0-9] to 12 or 16 chars, and they insist on 4 chars [0-9]... That's pretending, at most.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:10PM
Lots of credit cards go over satellite link - especially those at gas pumps.
The new "smart chips" seem to both be 3x slower than the old swipe system and also have been passed through an anti-user-experience design process making sure to require the card to be inserted when the user would naturally pull it out, require a signature when the user is still holding their wallet from getting the card out, instantly make a "you've done something WRONG" audible alarm when it's time to remove the card, and otherwise set an extremely low bar from which to improve in the future.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:47PM
Also depends where you live. If the USA stopped adding the tax after advertised price or adopted Swedish rounding, change would be a couple of bills and people wouldn't need to fish a penny out of their pocket.