Australian businesses selling essential goods and services to be forced to accept cash payments
Australian businesses selling essential goods and services to be forced to accept cash payments
Treasury confirms cheques will stay in circulation until 2029 but then cease to be accepted as legal tender
I thought this was already covered by cash just being legal tender.
You can't pay our council rates or water bills with cash. Come to think of it, I don't think you can pay electricity with cash either.
Cash 😍😍
Has anyone actually written out a cheque in their personal banking chequebook this century? I only did it occasionally in ye olden days, and mostly to post payments to utilities and pay rent etc. I don't think I ever stood in a store and wrote out a cheque. Hardly any would accept them without a prior arrangement.
I've used bank cheques this century, but not lately. Who's out there writing cheques?
We got a cheque book with our business banking account the better part of a decade ago now, and we've used 1.
When I was a checkout chump a million years ago people still occasionally brought in cheques and it meant taking copies of ID and all sorts because the dishonour ratio was too damn high.
Cash is so gross though. All those grubby mitts all over it, plus being stored in super icky places like bras and grunderpants. Big fan of cashless if for no other reason than keeping bits of other people off me.
Actual other reasons:
As proved by various outages, when electricity (or the internet, or the service provider, etc) is down and prevents digital transfers being made... cash doesnt work either, cause it's all the same POS / accounting software that handles cash which is also down.
Also if a natural disaster takes out internet access for an extended period, wheres the cash a business needs to keep on hand going to suddenly appear from? I haven't worked in retail in a decade or more, but we always kept as little cash as possible on hand due to the constant threat of robbery. Even back then cash was way less than 50% of transactions, I'd be surprised if it was even in the double digit percentages anymore.
and when the electricity is down you can shop at all
Agree with the bit about it being easier to keep track of payments with electronic payment.
Cash does have a cost, though it’s less visible.
Cash does have a cost
It's a pain in the butthole tbh.
From a checkout chump perspective it was probably 40 minutes of my day wasted dealing with the cash. Getting it dispensed, double counting it all, depositing in to the safe when you had too much, watching out for dodgy currency or those dickheads who try the quick "I give you a 5 and you round up the change to 10 and then I'll swap that for a 20 and then give you 30 so I get a 50" scam, dealing with damaged or defaced currency, recounting at end of day, getting reamed for being too far up or too far down in the count, having to sign forms to swear to god you hadn't knocked off a pineapple (or put too many pineapples in the drawer)...
Then you need a safe storage space for the cash, security to protect the cash, literally a whole industry built on transporting it around the place, keep enough cash on hand to provide change, keep enough to cover EFT withdrawals.
There's a lot of cost to handling cash. Also its gross. Did I mention its gross yet? Getting warm notes that were slightly sticky was disgusting.
Consumers have a right to options. Our internet/pos has been a bit temperamental these last couple of weeks (they're still trying to figure out why) but thankfully we take cash so the cogs keep turning, we keep selling product and making orders and we all still get paid.