Six dollars and 50
cents is a lot to pay for a scoop of ice cream, no matter how artisanal. But
that is the cost at Van Leeuwen’s 20 ice cream shops in New York City. It is
especially egregious when you consider that a full pint of Van Leeuwen, which
contains two and a half servings of ice cream, depending on your
self-discipline, costs only a few dollars more.
اضافة اعلان
But some people have not been allowed to pay for Van
Leeuwen’s ice cream, be it vegan or French, at all. For nearly two years after
New York City banned retail stores from being cashless, Van Leeuwen shops in
New York refused to comply. The company bore down on this defiance with a
brazenness that felt almost ideological. Not only did signs warn customers that
its stores did not take cash — until last month, when it finally acquiesced
after threat of legal action — it violated the law at least 90 times and
declined to show up for administrative hearings. The company also declined to
respond to repeated requests for comment.
“Nobody should be discriminated against because they
only want to or can pay with cash,” Vilda Vera Mayuga, commissioner of New York
City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, told me after Van Leeuwen
finally conceded defeat.
“It is not for the business to decide who they want
to serve.”
Maybe you did not need that serving of Royal Wedding
Cake ice cream with elderflower and lemon anyway. Lots of people like to avoid
scrounging for pennies at the bottom of their bags or standing behind someone
in line who does. Many businesses prefer cashless transactions too. What is the
problem?
Clearly a cash-free economy has its beneficiaries,
foremost banks, and credit card companies: Visa and Mastercard reap $138
billion from participating merchants in service fees a year. According to a
recent report in The Economist, Visa, and Mastercard are two of the most
profitable companies in the world, with net margins of 51 percent and 46
percent last year.
It is also easy to pick up the rich scent of Silicon
Valley. In the rose-metallic vision of libertarians like Peter Thiel — who of
course, co-founded PayPal — operating in a cash-free world is easier and more
convenient than handling grubby lucre. Amazon has also been a notable opponent
to cashless bans in states like New Jersey; in the company’s original vision
for its Go stores, paper money was not an option.
Many people believe cashless is the wave of the
future, citing Sweden as an example. Countries such as India and South Korea
have also made a strong push toward a cash-free future. According to an
analysis of sales data by payment platform Square, the share of cashless
businesses nearly doubled in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada between
February 2020 and February 2021; in the US, cash payments dropped more than 8
percentage points in that period. And while the US is far from the vanguard on
going cash-free, here consumers use either credit or debit cards for 57 percent
of transactions. By 2022, 41 percent of Americans say they go cashless in a
typical week, up from 24 percent in 2015.
So who is paying for all this? While cash-free means
profits for credit card industries and efficiencies for merchants in terms of
training workers and managing their time, it is not cost-free for everyone. One
recent study found that merchants increase their prices by approximately 1.4
percent to offset the interchange fees they pay to credit card companies; for
those earning miles, that may not matter — but those who pay cash pay the
price.
Going cashless sounds so sleek and shiny and tech-forward, but like many high-tech initiatives, it does not necessarily translate into progress for all.
Moreover, many cashless venues use tablet payment
systems that automatically ask consumers to tip for a retail service that was
long standard. If you are like me, that screen may leave you flummoxed: are the
workers being paid less than minimum wage because these are now tipped jobs?
Will this barista think I am a jerk for not tacking on 20 percent or 30 percent
for a muffin?
Consumers also pay in terms of privacy. Do you want
your payment app or credit card company to share exactly how many beers or Big
Macs you have bought in the past week with its data partners or to know every
item you picked up at the pharmacy? And while a cash system is subject to
crime, like employee theft and robbery, digital payments are not without their
own risks, including double charges and identity theft.
But the most significant objection to a cashless
system is whom it shuts out. Whereas cash enables everyone, no matter their
age, credit history, immigration status, or income, to pay directly for goods
or services rather than use an intermediary, credit cards generally require a
bank account. Not everyone — including 301,700 households, or almost one in 10
households in New York City — has one. And even those who do, do not
necessarily want to add to their credit card debt. Regardless of whether they
have a choice, teenagers and people earning less than $30,000 a year are more
likely to use cash. This is also disproportionately true for minorities.
In response to these disparities, Philadelphia, San
Francisco, New York City, and the state of New Jersey have passed legislation
forbidding most merchants from refusing to accept cash. But that is a tiny
fraction of the country. Chicago’s proposed ban failed to pass in 2019. Though
the US Treasury notes on all bills, “this note is legal tender for all debts,
public and private”, there is no federal law mandating that all businesses
accept cash. In the absence of an explicit law stating otherwise, merchants can
decline any form of payment they like.
Going cashless sounds so sleek and shiny and tech-forward,
but like many high-tech initiatives, it does not necessarily translate into
progress for all. Given this country’s ongoing inflation, given the persistence
of its profound wealth disparities, given the paycheck-to-paycheck lives of
many Americans, widening another divide between the haves and the have-nots is
not the cost-free leap forward proponents make it out to be. Someone always
pays the price.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
