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 Cash or Card

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MarkUK
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MarkUK

Posts : 142
Join date : 2022-03-13
Location : Staffordshire

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PostSubject: Cash or Card   Cash or Card EmptySun 31 Jul 2022, 08:56

A moral dilemma that hasn't happened to me yet, but it will one day.
Imagine the scene - I enter a shop that has a sign "cards only, cash not accepted" I chose an item for £19.95, hand over a £20 note and walk out with my purchase. What can the shop do about it? Call the police? Surely not I've paid! Halt me at the door and demand the item back? Any thoughts?
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Meles meles
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Meles meles

Posts : 5037
Join date : 2011-12-30
Location : Pyrénées-Orientales, France

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PostSubject: Re: Cash or Card   Cash or Card EmptySun 31 Jul 2022, 12:44

An interesting point. I think a business can legally specify what means of payment it will accept and so it can refuse your cash - it may be company policy not to handle cash because of security concerns or to prevent staff theft, while they may actually be forbidden from accepting large payments in cash by money laundering laws. In your example the £20 note is of course 'legal tender' however that term has a strict definition that just means if you have a court awarded debt against you, if someone tries to settle and they're paying in legal tender you cannot refuse it.

As I see it the matter depends on whether the goods or services being offered are reclaimable in the event of you refusing to pay by the business's specified method. If it is a shop and they refuse to accept your cash, they would be legally entitled to take the goods back off you. However if it was a cafe and you've already consumed the food and drink then the goods are not reclaimable. In this event you have incurred a debt and so they cannot refuse to accept payment in cash although that might require them to take you to court to get the debt awarded against you. Either way they would be rather foolish to refuse you offering immediate payment in cash. However in your specific example, if they did get a court order for you to pay the £19.95 debt and you offered them a £20 note they would then not be obliged to give you the 5p change.

There is an additional nicety in that a business is not permitted to discriminate on the basis of a customer's age. Given that both very young and very old customers in retail environments may not have non-cash methods of payment, refusing cash could be perceived as age discrimination. The charity Age UK is currently lobbying on this point but I am not aware of any retailer having been taken to court on it yet. Arguably the very young would have an even stronger case in that credit/debit cards are usually only issued to those who are at least eighteen years old, however shops that target the youngest consumers, such as sweet shops, are probably not stupid enough to stop taking kids' pocket money.


Last edited by Meles meles on Mon 01 Aug 2022, 00:01; edited 1 time in total
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MarkUK
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MarkUK

Posts : 142
Join date : 2022-03-13
Location : Staffordshire

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PostSubject: Re: Cash or Card   Cash or Card EmptySun 31 Jul 2022, 14:16

I rather hope it happens one day. If I lived in a big city as opposed to a small town I suspect I would have come across this dilemma already.
I have my defence prepared - today it's all about inclusivity; they wouldn't refuse to serve me if I was black, disabled, gay or trans, but they have no problem discriminating against those without a smartphone or card of which there must be hundreds of thousands if not millions in the country. Surely that must be illegal.  
I do have cards (not a blasted smartphone though, so sod off with your QR codes!) but prefer good old fashioned cash, I'm just being awkward I know.
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LadyinRetirement
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LadyinRetirement

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Join date : 2013-09-16
Location : North-West Midlands, England

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PostSubject: Re: Cash or Card   Cash or Card EmptyFri 05 Aug 2022, 14:35

I may have mentioned this before - but not since you joined Mark - but the first time I used an ATM in the 1980s I said "Thank you" and then felt intensely silly afterwards.
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Meles meles
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Meles meles

Posts : 5037
Join date : 2011-12-30
Location : Pyrénées-Orientales, France

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PostSubject: Re: Cash or Card   Cash or Card EmptySat 06 Aug 2022, 12:11

The summer heat and now several violent thunderstorms overnight have caused havoc with electronic communication networks here in my part of southern France. Accordingly this morning the local supermarket, and indeed nearly all the other businesses in the town, have been accepting only cash (or cheques, you remember them, thankfully they're still commonly used in France) because unless one has independent satellite-based internet access the whole town's ADSL/cable network plus the fixed-line telephone lines are currently down, yet again, for the second time this week. Oh how I smugly smiled at all the foreign tourists ineffectually proffering their credit cards - whether chipped, pin'ed or contactless, they were all equally useless - while I was waved up to the front of the queue and so paid my €37.82 grocery bill, exactly, with just a few notes and coins.

MarkUK, your comments about mobile phones - whether they be smart or dumb - also stuck a chord. 

As I mentioned above, the communication networks are nor particularly robust here in remote and rural southern France. Where I live there is still no mobile coverage, however many Gs the networks claim, but I did still have a fixed telephone line (with Orange) which also supported the credit card machine for my business. That was until about five years ago when a thunderstorm knocked it all out (as well as physically blowing up my telephone). To cut a very long story short Orange kept saying they were sending someone to fix it, only for me to keep calling to say it still didn't work, and for them to say a technician would be there in 24 hours ... and so round and round for six weeks until I simply cancelled the contract. However sometime later I did manage to collar, nicely, the technician while he was working on another line, and he admitted that he'd only been told to turn out once to attend to my line, had promptly reported that the whole infrastructure needed replacing, and had thereafter heard nothing more. Orange have never publicly said that they have abandoned the line but as the technician freely admitted that is actually what they have done. Accordingly I, and I suspect all the other houses along that 8km telephone line, have found other solutions. I now have a voice-over-IP telephone via my computer's satellite connection (remember there's no mobile phone coverage here) unfortunately it still doesn't work very reliably, although the credit card machine does seem to work OK.

Faced with all this and the fact that it is now almost impossible to buy anything at all online without the means to independently receive a security code or QR scan, just a few months ago I finally gave in to the inevitable and decided to get a mobile phone, despite the fact that there's still no coverage here and so I'll rarely get to use it.

However just buying a mobile phone was complicated ... largely because to get one you are supposed to already have one. Orange will not accept an order for a mobile phone, nor arrange delivery of said phone to an address, without an acceptable, Orange-approved, telephone contact. In the end I managed to fool the system with a very old mobile number (no doubt long-since reassigned to someone else) to get round it trying to send a secure code to a fixed telephone (defunct because Orange themselves have abandoned the line) while also side-stepping the fact that Orange's database (which as a customer you cannot edit) has my address completely wrong. Luckily though my regular postie knows my name and address and was able to put two-and-two together, and so it arrived without problem. But to actually use it I still have to drive 2km up to the village if I'm to have any chance of getting a signal.

Isn't technology wonderful. silent
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