[buran77]

What about the extra costs of handling cash, the practical effort to count it, prepare it for transport (including bags, counters, and so on), transporting to the bank, increased security, possibly more cash registers, counterfeit detectors etc.? Overall is it usually more expensive to take credit cards than cash or just in particular cases?

[anticorporate]

Retailer here: Most of these costs are fairly fixed. We have to have a safe, bags, armored transport, staff training on counterfeit detection, etc. whether the percentage of our sales in cash is 8% or 80%. The few costs that are variable are still far, far less than the processing fees.

It's also worth noting there are also huge fixed costs for credit card transactions. We're currently upgrading our pinpads and it's been an absolute nightmare to get the right parts in just for physically connecting the damn things to our counters, we lost almost a whole day of backend POS access for our vendor to push a required update, and I'm looking at more fees to be able to support other types of cards which require POS certification.

We strongly prefer our customers use cash.

[tomjakubowski]

There are a number of brick and mortar retailers I frequent who swing the other way and don't accept cash, only credit or debit. Presumably, they prefer paying the cost of credit card fees to the costs of handling cash. What's driving that difference?

[anticorporate]

Margins, maybe? I work for a grocery retailer. A healthy profit margin in my industry is roughly equivalent to the percentage we pay in credit card fees.

Couple that with inertia. We couldn't go cash-only even if we wanted to without pissing off a lot of our customers and losing sales. We only recently decided the cost of check fraud outweighed the push back we knew we'd get if we discontinued accepting personal checks.

We're a community-owned business with a fiercely loyal customer base. When we tell folks what payment method is cheapest for us, many will actually choose to use that payment method just to help us save money.

[antonymoose]

Buddy of mine runs a cash only bar and grill.

The costs to handle cash are fairly low. He bought one of those fancy cash counters like they have at the bank for a few hundred. He also bought one of those cheap little ATMs for perhaps $500 and charges $1 to take out cash. He keeps $2,000 on hand at all times between the safe and the ATM itself. Otherwise, he just stops by the bank two blocks down the street to deposit profits. As for security, well, they just carry concealed weapons.

The ATM paid for itself in the first month, presumably also the cash counter machine. Notably they did have one counterfeit $100 come through that they forgot to scan. I suppose that’s novel to cash although chargebacks on cards also do occur.

[Qem]

At least these are mostly local jobs.

[lxgr]

Is inefficiency somehow better if it creates local jobs?

[chadgpt3]

As long as we live in this economic system it's important that something creates local jobs.