[Anon4Now]

During Covid, my business slowed way down, and I took a part time job at a gas station convenience store (because selling cigarettes made be essential). The store was in a suburb of Portland with an average household income in the top 10 of Oregon, but there were also a lot of trade workers, undocumented immigrants, and generally a good mix of income levels.

Some relevant observations:

- Lower income customers used cash much more than higher income.

- Men used cash way more than women, with the exception of retirement-age women buying their smokes / wine / beer.

- Undocumented workers almost always used cash. Most were paid in $100 bills on Fridays, so they were probably paid under the table.

- Phone tap-to-pay was almost exclusively iPhone. In fact, I don't think I ever saw an Android user pay by phone tap.

- A surprising number of people didn't realized they could just tap to pay instead of running the chip.

- If the till ran out of pennies for change, no one gave a shit.

[devilbunny]

> didn't realized they could just tap to pay instead of running the chip

The tap zone is often not clearly marked. Some places (e.g., Walmart) it doesn't work at all (yes, even using a card instead of a phone). If you pull the card out anyway, I find that I end up having to use the chip about one time in ten. If that were, say, three times in ten, I'd just stick to inserting the card in the chip reader. Those rarely seem to fail.

[IAmBroom]

And GP really doesn't know how many of those people had tap-to-pay cards, but just assumed everyone did.

I have several payment cards. Only one is tap-to-pay.

[Anon4Now]

I only brought it up to customers who had tap symbols on their cards. The surprising part wasn't that they didn't realize that they could tap, it's that they didn't even know that the technology existed.

[devilbunny]

You must have some old cards, then. I don’t think any I’ve been issued in the past five years have a chip but don’t have tap-to-pay. (Gift cards are usually swipe-only, for cost reasons.)

But good point.

[mmooss]

> Undocumented workers

How could you tell who was undocumented?

[Anon4Now]

They didn't speak English, and I speak a little Spanish. I got to know a lot of these guys, so I asked them. My boss immigrated from Mexico, and he explained the under-the-table pay setup. Many landscapers and contractors in the area pay workers under the table because a lot of them under report income to the IRS. Plus, my stepmom was illegal before my dad and her got married, so it's no big deal to me.

[IAmBroom]

> Some relevant data-free guesses: