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When The Cash Register Doesn't Take Cash

posted by FatPhil on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-the-tip dept.

Justin Case brings us this story from NPR's Morning Edition:

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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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:53PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:53PM (#619993) Journal

    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.

    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).

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