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Australian businesses selling essential goods and services to be forced to accept cash payments
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
63 points (100.0% liked)
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I don't disagree with cashless being the preferred method, but cash should always be an option because e.g. in case of disaster, the infrastructure that cashless depends on can be impaired for a while.
As proved by various outages, when electricity (or the internet, or the service provider, etc) is down and prevents digital transfers being made... cash doesnt work either, cause it's all the same POS / accounting software that handles cash which is also down.
Also if a natural disaster takes out internet access for an extended period, wheres the cash a business needs to keep on hand going to suddenly appear from? I haven't worked in retail in a decade or more, but we always kept as little cash as possible on hand due to the constant threat of robbery. Even back then cash was way less than 50% of transactions, I'd be surprised if it was even in the double digit percentages anymore.
If you have pen and paper and the key to the drawer you don't need a working POS on the spot to accept cash while comms are out and record the transactions later.
And exactly: where does the cash appear from? That's the "should always be an option" part.
Of course there's drawbacks for everything: less secure for staff if you accept cash vs inability to do anything when comms fail if you don't.
There might be a further point, although I haven't looked into the reasons: Sweden started the cashless experiment before and they are backpedaling now.