this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
43 points (100.0% liked)
Australia
3618 readers
85 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've actually gone back to using cash when most merchants are Charing a 1.5% card fee. Fuck that shit.
Yeah same. I'd be really interested to know what the cost of cash is, my guess is more than 1.5% with the extra effort needing to be put into banking, slower transactions, mistakes and fake notes. Seems like most businesses are just assuming laziness of their customers just wanting to tap.
It's a tax dodge. You can skim off the top easier with cash.
Well, that and the fact that every credit card transaction includes a transaction fee that the business ends up paying. When they add 1.5% (I've usually seen 2.5%) they're just moving the expense from being hidden inside the list price of the things you're buying to being added at the register.
Think of it like a "bank tax” in addition to sales tax. Business could easily include tax in the price, but they don't because customers are used to seeing the lower price and having tax added at the register.
Right, but as @tfyoung said above, there are costs to the business associated with cash as well. Probably much higher, if a little harder to precisely calculate.
The time and expense associated with handling, counting, and physically banking cash is not insignificant.
It's that harder to calculate part that makes some business favor cash. After all, the humans running the business are not perfect economic machines. Some people are going to favor a nebulous expense (that they honestly probably didn't consider at all) over a clear and obvious expense.
I often opt-out of stores that add a bonus fee when the transaction is high enough that it should be their operating cost, but pretty much 100% of utility bills have are tacking their fees onto the next bill.
It seems like a very anti-consumer practice that is going to become ubiquitous.