An excellent point. How does one “make it rain” electronically?
Of course, on the other end of the extreme, a sudden, unannounced deluge of hundreds of solid Susan B. Anthony’s moving with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s2 in a dark room packed with semi-clad, semi-plastered clubgoers can be downright catastrophic…
There are people who don’t have credit cards and for a variety of reasons.
I suppose restaurants have a right not to want to serve these people but if every restaurant only took credit cards then these people would have no place to eat out.
(Ironically, some of these people work in restaurants. My son works at a restaurant and a lot of his co-workers cash out their paychecks from the daily take and live on cash, including their tips. Funny how people who work in restaurants aren’t welcome in some restaurants.)
Some horndog genius will develop an app where transactions between strippers and ooglers will link in some pronounced and spirited way. Not like I’d know anything about that only because I don’t create apps and I’m no genius.
I foresee a chip reader embedded in clear heels becoming the industry standard.
i would hope it would go something like this:
You will miss out on tucking the $$ .
I GOT IT.
NFC readers on the stage. swipe phone and a small light (obviously red) will appear, bringing the performer over to you.
Brilliant, in a Pavlovian sense. And whoever pays more, their light shines brighter (or redder)…
Weird… I always thought the hipster restaurants followed the OG ethnic ones in that regard.
The OG ethnic ones not accepting cards is ludicrous to me though. In Mexico City even taco places selling $.50 tacos till 5 am take cards…
Like they don’t even have bank accounts?.. How wild of a life are you living to not even have a bank account??
I say this as someone who lives a pretty racy lifestyle…
This is going in the right direction.
credit & debit cards are subject to fees known as interchange fees which the issuing bank assesses to accept charges made to the card. beyond a flat percentage (which varies depending on the card as well as the industry of the business - supermarkets and service stations charge 0.5% less than other retail industries, for example). the banks pay card holders their benefits out of these interchange fees.and the cards with the best benefits charge vendors the highest interchange rates - with the current max for visa & mastercard being about 2.4% using a signature preferred card.
with the least expensive cards, the rates for industries like supermarkets and service station is about 1.15%, but for most other retail situations, the typical interchange fees run about 1.65% and $.10 a transaction. then the processor adds their margin, which for a small business best case scenario is probably about 20 basis points (basis point is 1/100 of a percent) and another $.07 a transaction. call it 1.85% and $.17 cents. (lots of processors pad a lot more).
however, the overall aggregate rate can still vary because the interchange fee includes a flat fee component per transaction which can run from say $.10 to $.25 a transaction. that may not seem like much, but $.25 is an additional 2% on a charge of $12.50. which means if someone offers a visa signature preferred card for a $12.50 bill, the vendor ends up getting charged close to 5% on that charge; a single charge of $125 with a single fee of $.25 on a visa signature preferred assesses an aggregate at about 2.6% while 10 charges of $12.50.aggregate out to close to 5%.
this is why businesses try to set a limit on the minimum charge. i believe that $10 is the current legal limit - and they still take a beating on those amounts. i don’t blame places for trying to avoid taking those transactions.
as a consequence a lot of small businesses running small ticket amounts use processors such as square that offer a flat 2.75% aggregate rate. square loses money on vendors doing really small ticket sizes but apparently they recoup their losses elsewhere.
i would assume that this place is taking cards and incurring upwards of a 2.75% surcharge to do so because it’s worth it to minimize the chances of robbery doing a cash only business… and they’re probably (unlawfully) adding the cost of the surcharge on to their customers.
I have much more issues with debit card safety. They can be easily used to rack up a large amount before it can be reported. Cash you carry and that’s it. I’m from the school of using whatever tool is correct for the moment. I like the flexibility of being able to pay cash or credit.
And frankly, call it a carryover from antics in my youth, but I like the ability to pay for cash and not be tracked where I was. I like how you can wave cash in front of someone and often get a better deal because cash in hand is still more mesmerizing than waving a plastic card.
In the end, I just want me some choices.
I thought they changed the law so now it’s not illegal to have a minimum charge or adding a service fee.
I’m pretty non-judgmental and have no issues with strip clubs. But one time for a bachelor party, several guys wanted to go and I got dragged even though I wasn’t in the mood since I didn’t know most of the group. (side note, teenage me would have never fathomed passing up a chance to look at nekkid women, wow, is this maturity?) Anyway, I decided to amuse myself and took a fistful of Sacagawea gold coins to tip. When I tried tipping, at first the girls would get mad and then after I showed them it wasn’t quarters and started joking with them, lots of the girls started to flock over wanting one.
So it turned out I did manage to amuse myself and irritate the rest of the party because the girls were ignoring everyone else while they hovered around me and my stupid gold dollars.
In this scenario, were you trying to order from an old-school taco truck in Cudahy, or were you trying to order from a self-consciously hip place in Westwood? Is there any potential customer in a relatively high SES area that isn’t going to be carrying a card, even if they’re also carrying cash? Knowing your target audience is obviously important, as well. If a cash-only eatery in the SGV opened a branch in Westwood, do you think they’d remain cash only on that side of town? Most likely not.
When I plan to eat in the SGV, I also have to make a special trip to go to the ATM to get enough cash. I don’t see too many people complaining about that…
[quote=“J_L, post:32, topic:4464”]
Hardly. Cash & card aren’t mutually exclusive.[/quote]
For YOU, they are not mutually exclusive. For some other people (i.e., me, and I assume most of the people in our generation… I assume we’re different ages), we vastly prefer credit cards b/c we DON’T carry cash on us. I think I can count the number of times on one hand that either me or a friend paid for a meal w/ cash over the last 10 years.
Often times I don’t even have $10 cash on me. I specifically DON’T carry cash b/c I think it’s a nuisance. I don’t want to have to deal w/ change or shuffling through my wallet. I like having a record of everything I spend in a month so that I can potentially enter it into a spreadsheet from a single source to see what I’m spending $ on. Yes, you can do that w/ cash + credit, but it’s a pain in the a$$ from a workflow perspective.
From a business perspective, it’s also a pain in the a$$ to have to input data from multiple different sources, especially if the volume is high. W/ credit-card only, you have a single electronic source to record daily. You could probably even run a report to see the trends in “cash” flow through the days to more efficiently target your operating hrs, if that were an issue.
[quote=“J_L, post:32, topic:4464”]
In your $20 scenario, I can pay $10 cash, and also (gads!) whip out the card and pay the overage with the card.[/quote]
Yes, and what happens when you’re at the farmer’s market and have blown your cash wad and only have the card left and have 3 other stalls you like to visit to make purchases? You still have to use your credit card anyway. So, from a vendor’s perspective, why bother w/ cash at all (unless you plan to under-report or are being killed by surcharges). It makes sense that, if you’re going to priortize one form of payment over another b/c it perhaps makes more sense for your work flow, you would prioritize the credit card over cash.
Apple got rid of the floppy drive and command lines (w/ an assist from Xerox). Cash will never disappear, I assume, but there are very valid reasons why businesses don’t want to deal w/ it.
Probably not, actually, since the receipt that I received from my last purchase there didn’t have a line-item breakout for a credit card surchage and since there’s no way of proving that they’re charging you more only when you use a credit card. Honestly, if the aggregate fee is 2.75%, you just charge make the prices higher 3% across the board than you would’ve otherwse, and you’re fine (I assume; I’m not a lawyer)… Doubt anyone is going to balk paying $10.20 vs. $10, for example…
In typical fashion, CA is one of the states that doesn’t allow for this. You can, however, give a discount for using cash.
And since I’ve very off topic, I’m a gonna say peace out now… 
Look, I got nothing against cards (I carry them myself). My beef in this matter is that the consumer has less CHOICES in how s/he pays when management decides that cash is no longer an accepted form of payment at a taqueria.
I actually agree with you on this line. But in Westwood (as I suspect in most other parts of this country), there ARE people who use BOTH cash, as well as cards. And yes, as incredible as it may seem in 2016, some of us predominantly cash-users still walk the Earth.
I clearly recall meeting you at the Clusi Batusi dinner (remember those Chowhound Days?), and our ages are not more than 5 years apart. Maybe I’m just a LUDDITE (Salud, @bulavinaka!!!), but know that everyone can view and treat money in unique, personal ways. Take my view, for example: I take a wad of my cash (which I’m perfectly comfortable spending all in one place, or spread out over several meals), and call it my “dining cash”. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. I consider my “dining cash” to be purely disposable to begin with, and I could care less about tracking how I spend it. But that’s me. Some may say that’s frivolous or careless or cumbersome, and to that I respond by saying - Hey, we live in a pluralistic society. We just have a difference in the way we view money, I believe.
I DO know that (1) there is no way to get electronically defrauded with cash (another side benefit of paying by cash: The diner/customer can retain anonymity if s/he so chooses), and (2) it is impossible to go into debt from impulse buying/overcharging if I’m using cash. These two facts are far more important for me (J_L) than begin able to track my spending. In fact, for me, looking at a spreadsheet on my spent money is far more of a pain-in-the-ass than shuffling through my wallet. It seems like you definitely like to electronically track your spending, and that’s totally great and cool. I hate making electronic tracks that don’t need to be made. Again, I’m a self-professed luddite. 
Different strokes for different folks.
Chance favors the prepared. My cash-payer view: If you’re gonna go shopping, and even if there’s a slim chance you might be impulse-buying more than you expect, then the answer is simple: Bring more cash to begin with!
With each move in the digital direction (such as the one Tacos Tu Madre just made), the future of cash becomes just a bit less certain…
This has been a really interesting discussion (drifted though the thread has…)
I said I potentially enter into a spreadsheet, not that I actually DID enter into a apreadsheet. Again, I make no judgment about how people spend their $; I was simply trying to translate the (small) business perspective into a consumer perspective. Having “reportable” data (like the kind you could enter into a spreadsheet) may help for business reasons; cash, I imagine, is not easily translatable into useful reportable data.
And I guess my main point is that you, for obvious reasons, are looking at it from a consumer’s perspective. Since I run a small business, I think I tend to look at it from the other side. Aside from PITA surcharges, there are VERY powerful motivations to move to a credit-card/electronic-only forms of payment, esp if you don’t purposely intend to under-report. And so I wouldn’t hold it against a business to limit my choices, esp if the limitations are already compatible w/ what I already do (heh).
I never guess about age b/c I’m frequently wrong. And based on what you’ve said about your time at USC, I would not have guessed our ages to be that close (although I didn’t actually do the math). You never know; perhaps I made a deal w/ the devil (that I’d prob have way more $$$, if I did!). Or, if you think I’m older than I am, then apparently I’m ageing like crap.
Aside from age, cultural issues may also play a role in the cash vs. credit-card debate.
And on a food related note (yes!), my partner was recently wondering where we can re-create the Clusi Batusi experience (for ourselves, not necessarily as a group dinner!). A good neighborhood pasta joint that’s reasonably priced. Is La Vecchia on Main in SaMo any good (this question is for anyone/everyone)? And, yes, I still dream of that pappardelle he made… ::sigh::
Small world! I, too, run a business(es). My abnormal desire for a healthy bottom line urges me to take whatever money is being thrown my way, as long as it’s legal tender and not too costly to retrieve/deposit/liquidate (cash, check, credit, gold ingots, first-borns ) Sure, the bookkeeping is more of a PITA, but I’ve hired good decent employees and have good accounting, so it’s all workable.
And Chef Michele from Clusi Batusi has informed me that is planning to open a new restaurant up north! Can you say “FTC Road Trip”?! Will let everyone here know once more details emerge…