2023-09-17
So a couple of weeks ago I went to see a concert at a local venue, after waiting in line and going through airport like security checks(another fucking annoying thing). I go in and order a drink before the concert starts, after the guy pours the drink I go to pay with cash in hand. Then I get “Sorry we don’t take cash”. I’m sitting there thinking like WTF are you serious. I did not see any signs stating they do not take cash either. They may have had it posted on their door, but security was in a rush to get everyone though, so I may have not seen it. At this point I would have just walked away and left the venue, but I was there to see a band and had already paid for it, nor did I want to risk getting kicked out of the venue had I just walked away(with out taking the drink with me of course), so I ended up paying with my debit card.
After talking to one of my co-workers about it, he said this is becoming a more frequent thing, especially in larger cities, and he said some of them won't even take debit, and will only take credit cards. All though this is the first time I have encountered this. My co-worker goes to more normie venues that are popular so and are typically owned by multi-national companies(The venue I went to is owned by a multi-national company, though it use to be owned locally).
One of the first things I did when I got home was look up the legality of refusing cash, and its completely legal for business to do so in North America and most places in Europe, though banks advise against refusing cash.
I do not like using my debit card for a variety of reasons, I do use it sometimes at businesses I trust, but 95% of my translations are done through cash. Here are some reasons why use cash:
Protection against fraud - This is the number one reason why I use cash over plastic. I’ve had my card skimmed at least twice in the last 10 years, some of my friends have there cards skimmed a lot more frequently then me, sometimes a few times a year. Its also annoying to phone up my bank and dispute the charges and wait for them to withdraw the changes.
Service outages - Service outages have been becoming more and more frequent, either the internet goes down in a certain area or the payment service goes down for some reason. Its pretty funny watching people panic when they can’t buy anything because the system went down, and I’m like “No internet, no problem”. I general think society has become a to dependent on the internet and we are surrendering a lot of redundancy for perceived convenience.
Budgeting – Its a lot easier to stick to a budget when using cash.
Privacy - I don’t think that my bank is selling all my data off to data brokers or is going to de-bank me for my opinions, however there is really no way to know for sure if they are or are not. There also is a lot of concern that certain people are pushing for a cashless society as a means to track and control people behaviors(I do agree with this sediment to an extant) however Banks and Financial Institutions can and have been known to close down costumer's bank accounts for committing “wrong think” and I can think of a couple of cases off the top of my head where this has happened(In the West), so yeah if banks refuse to do business with you how are you going to withdraw cash in the first place and everyone is kinda forced to use banks these days. There more to this, but that's another blog post.
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