[moron4hire]

I've had a lot of taxi drivers tell me they couldn't take credit cards at all. That is, until I tell them "I have no other way to pay, so I guess... later dude". Suddenly it's, "oh, oh, oh, the card reader is working again, look at that!"

[munk-a]

Whenever I get into an airport taxi I always mention "Oh you take credit card right?" due to the queue system at airports they either reply yes and, if they actually don't, I get out guilt free at the other end - or they reply no and I move to the next taxi down the line. A significant number of airport taxis do shady stuff to try and extract extra or under the table payment.

(Edit, just to clarify - I get out of the Taxi on the other end guilt free because the driver lied to me about payment options. I don't like skipping out on service payments - I think people should be paid fairly for the work they're doing (even if I could get away with not paying)... but if you're lying to me you're doing me a disservice)

[profmonocle]

This reminds of of when I was in Oslo back in 2014. We ordered food at a small restaurant after confirming they accepted credit cards. When it came time to pay, the woman behind the counter refused to scan our credit cards because they had no chips. (It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try.)

We didn't have cash, so we just left. The woman was furious. We hadn't received our food yet, but it was already being cooked. She screamed at us to go to an ATM a few blocks away, get cash, and come back. We just found another restaurant. If the card hadn't worked I would've felt bad and probably done that, but she wouldn't even try it. Don't advertise that you take credit cards and get mad when customers try to use them.

[lmm]

> It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try.

Just because the terminal has a magstripe reader on doesn't mean her merchant account provider accepts it. Plenty don't, or some transfer the liability to the store in that case.

> If the card hadn't worked I would've felt bad and probably done that, but she wouldn't even try it. Don't advertise that you take credit cards and get mad when customers try to use them.

In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken. I don't think you can put this one on her.

[jjav]

> In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken.

2014. I don't remember with 100% confidence, but I'm pretty sure none of my (many) credit cards had a chip back in 2014.

Stores here didn't even start installing chip reader card stations until ~2018 or so.

[lmm]

OK sure, but in 2014 in Norway a card without a chip might as well be broken. If I turned up to a restaurant where you are, asked if I could pay by card, ordered, and then busted out my UnionPay card and demanded they accept that, would you say that was reasonable?

[profmonocle]

> In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken.

Chips were basically non-existent on US cards in 2014.

[munk-a]

That's true - but they were widespread pretty much everywhere else in the world including Norway. Up here in Canada we tend to say "Do you take interac?" instead of credit - but if credit is just the way people talk about chip-n-pin in Norway the understanding might be that walking into a store with a non-chip-n-pin card and asking for credit is dishonest.

I'm not Norwegian but it'd be pretty similar up here in Canada at this point - if your POS terminal gets damaged and your mag stripe reader breaks there isn't really a big reason to immediately shutter your store and replace it.

[CamperBob2]

And people wonder why Uber killed the whole taxi industry overnight.

[munk-a]

Well, in all fairness, Uber mostly killed the whole taxi industry by being really really illegal and not following any of the rules - including those meant for regulatory capture and those for safety. About 3000 women are sexually assaulted by Uber drivers every year - I'm not saying that doesn't happen with taxis too, just be careful about painting a too-rosy picture.

[girvo]

No one painted a too-rosy picture. They just pointed out that Uber killed Taxis because Taxis ran on horrible service plus a government mandated monopoly. Take away the latter like Uber did, and there’s no need to put up with the former.

[profmonocle]

I'm not sure how it was in the early days of Uber, but these days Uber does background checks on drivers, and IIRC they have for quite some time. Is there really any reason to believe that cab companies would do a better job of weeding out horrible people than Uber? I can't imagine they do much more than a background check.

[munk-a]

There is legal oversight and reporting required from conventional cab companies. And yes this was very much from the early days of Uber - when people cheered on the fact that they identified regulators and refused to book rides for them so they couldn't formally record violations.

[profmonocle]

Oh holy christ, I hadn't heard of them doing that. Doesn't shock me, sadly.

[munk-a]

Oh, a source[1] - this is why I'm extremely skeptical of the goodness of disrupting. Building a new competitor that can straight up out compete existing monopolies is one thing but beating existing companies by refusing to play by the same rules removes the power of law from society.

It was super depressing at the time to hear the Libertarian crowd come out in staunch defense of this program.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/uber-uses-secret-pr...

[aaronfitz]

They run the background checks, but they might not take any action on the result of them. A friend of a friend is a registered sex offender who drives for them. They stalled him for about 6 months, but ended up allowing him to drive when he was still willing to after the long delay.

[signatoremo]

Taxi in a lot of places, and I’ve been to many countries, don’t follow the rules either. Turn off meter, take long route, all the shady stuff, pretend to not understand foreigners

[dzhiurgis]

I've filled up gas once for the driver in Malaysia.