Cashless Society !!

[Willo]

Australians lose nearly $1 billion a year to card surcharges as RBA warns banks to stop — ABC News

In short: Australians are losing nearly a billion dollars a year in card surcharges, which can be substantially reduced when least-cost routing is properly implemented. Least-cost routing, or LCR, is a Reserve Bank scheme aiming to cut card payment processing fees for businesses and see savings...

apple.news

 

[Ian4]

I just spent 16 days in Europe (10 days in London and 2 days each in Hamburg, Brussels and Rotterdam). And what I learnt is that everywhere is borderline cashless. I went to a few London pubs that were cashless. Obviously, sports stadiums were cashless (but it’s the same here).

But even the places that do accept cash… after you have ordered your pint or your meal, they shove the EFT terminal in your face expecting that’s how you intend on paying. That’s the culture now. If I wanted to pay by cash, I actually had to ask them if they accepted cash.

I had a few conversations with locals about this and apparently one of the initial post-lockdown rules was that cash was banned, and everything was paid by card. When they relaxed the rules, many pubs chose not to revert back.

Oh, and not one venue charged merchant fees. Not one.

 

[RoarEmotion]

The psychology of the fee being baked into the price vs it being tacked on at the end is interesting.

Saying you didn’t get charged a fee is baloney. You get charged the fee whether it’s broken out as a line or not. Potentially there is cash/card cross subsidisation but the cost to the business is there and needs to be covered in the prices charged.

I think as a business just baking it in is smarter and reduces that ill will feeling. Then searching out the lowest cost transaction fees means you can either lower prices and win more volume or take it as profit.

Cash handling has its own costs that don’t explicitly get passed on.