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The methods of payment ought to correspond with the size of the purchase. I'd understand a store not taking cash if they sold high-ticket items (such as jewelry stores, designer fashion houses, appliance/furniture stores, etc.), but it would seem smaller-scale businesses like restaurants, convenience stores, or grocery stores would lose potential customers by not accepting cash. I would not bring $4000 in cash to pay for a Coach bag, but I'd feel foolish dropping that Visa card on the counter to pay for a $1.79 Diet Pepsi.
Can't say "a lot" as I do not make it a habit to visit every business in my area. Can say a few have strange rules of payment. Credit card purchase must be $5 or over. no check cashing or charging a check cashing fee.
No travelers checks or ebt cards. Paper money and coins have rarely been denied. Unless its foreign currency.
And oddly I paid all cash for my tv at Sears. Got my receipt and a 5% discount . Helped for the sales tax.
The Chex-x system guards against bounced checks or closed accounts. Within 1 minute after I present a check .. I can see a hold on my account balance. Electronic varification has been around for awhile.
Private business will take revenue .. Rarely have I been told no cash. Particularly when their credit card system goes offline...
Does the merchant still get paid if the credit card was fake or stolen? If they're going to be paranoid, I'd think they'd be concerned about that as well.
Does the owner really like paying credit card fees on small purchases??? Or is he afraid of being robbed?
The more card transactions a merchant has, the lower the rate the credit card processor charges. Further, debit transactions are flat fee and typically are lower than the merchant fee charged by the credit card processors. It might be the merchant places a higher value on the costs associated with dealing with cash (security, cash management, etc.) than the processing cost.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhureeKeeper
Does the merchant still get paid if the credit card was fake or stolen? If they're going to be paranoid, I'd think they'd be concerned about that as well.
Yes they do. It is the credit card company and their member issuers that assume the risk on credit card fraud.
And they do it because of the possibility of counterfeit bills.
Well I guess they just lose business when their credit card system goes down. Never heard of any businesses in my area doing this. In fact some encourage cash by charging less if u use cash and some businesses will only take cash if the purchase is under $5.
Those pens that supposedly detect counterfeit money dont always work. The only true way is to know about the security features of each bill. Most money has that identifier thread built into the bill.
Correct. We just got two fake $100 bills at work this week, and both were swiped with the pen. We had to go to the bank and retrieve them and are eating the loss. We have young cashiers, and they stopped after swiping with the pen, rather than look for the identifiers on the bill.
The thing we are always nervous about are checks. Not many people write checks any more, but you have very little protection if one goes south.
There was just an article about this the other day about how so many businesses were going cash free. It wasn't a happy article either. There are a lot of drawbacks to the cash free idea. Some of the things they listed were how it hurts the poor, people who may not have a bank account. And how prices will go up reflect the charges the credit card companies and banks will charge to merchants to cover the cost of processing all those cards.
But when it comes to counterfeits, the merchants are their own worst enemies right now. The best way to guard against counterfeits is for every employee to know what a real bill feels like. I can tell a counterfeit just by touch. However, I don't expect any employee to be able to do that without years of counting boatloads of cash. So the next best thing (which is NOT happening now) is to teach your employees basic money handling skills that anyone can learn.
Expect your employees to learn who is on what bill and count them by looking at the picture, not the corners. Anyone can tear off the corners of a 20 and tape it to a one dollar bill and get $19 in change back. Also, keep all the money faced up AND going in the same direction. Then if someone does slip a one into a couple of twenties, it's easily noticed. Also, employees should learn to count from the largest bill down to the smallest. $37 is twenty, thirty, thirty-five, thirty-six, and thirty-seven. That's how it should be counted out to the customer. And that should be the second counting. The first counting is when they take the money out of the register.
Teach and practice with the employees about the quick change artist tricks and how they can avoid being taken in. And don't accept anything larger than a $20 at your place of business and have signs up advertizing that. Be strict about it. Watch the bills you get at the bank. If a teller is caught with a counterfeit bill in her drawer, the loss goes on her record. Most tellers won't do this, but a few have been known to pass off the counterfeit bills to keep them from going on their records as losses.
This won't stop counterfeits 100% of the time, but it will cut down on them and it will certainly cut down cash losses in other ways, too.
I just had someone last night not have any tens or fives and gave me back $13 in change all in ones, every which way. He could have had any number of different bills in that mess and not known it.
If you're a manager and don't think your employees are worth a decent wage and the time it takes to train them correctly, then you deserve to eat the loss, as far as I'm concerned.
I've seen places that won't take $20 bills, but also won't take checks or credit cards. I don't know how they stay in business.
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Or is he afraid of being robbed?
