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Where to keep your card?
Comments
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Many places are card only because they do not want the cost of cash
Family run or multinational does not negate any of those things, they are costs even if it's a family running it. No security = get robbed and lose all your money.
They may well have been around longer because they are tax dodging
Sam Vimes' Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness:
People are rich because they spend less money. A poor man buys $10 boots that last a season or two before he's walking in wet shoes and has to buy another pair. A rich man buys $50 boots that are made better and give him 10 years of dry feet. The poor man has spent $100 over those 10 years and still has wet feet.
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And many businesses, including several with whom I transact regularly, are cash only because they don't want the cost of cards - and I can tell you with confidence, having spent two decades of my career as an error and fraud investigator employed by HMRC, that only a minority of these will be doing so to avoid paying their share. These mythical small business "tax dodgers" that you're obsessed enough with to warrant constantly repeating yourself on personal finance forums, are not the problem with regard to the tax take in this country.
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My barber, a one-man business, has recently gone cash only, citing "ridiculous" card fees. His landlord is happy to accept cash, he pays his own wage in cash and pops what he needs into his business bank account, using the Post Office. He's much happier with it, although he told me he has had to have quite a long grace period before dumping the card app as a lot of the Uni students among his clientele don't carry cash - indeed a lot of them do just rely solely on their phones for payments.
Horses for courses. A local coffee shop has been card-only for a while now, no doubt for reasons just as legitimate as my barber has.2 -
If anyone is relying on an RFID filtering wallet (I'm NOT saying you need one or should - that is a question for a technical forum), please, please, please test it!
My way was to pop my swipe card for work in one, then swipe the wallet - my favourites were £1 card wallets from (the now defunct) Poundworld! It would vary from one to the next, but I'd say they blocked at least 95% of swipes!
I bought some (moderately expensive to me) RFID blocking neck pouches from a major online retailer, supposed to keep your passport, etc. safe during travel - beep beep beep - I don't think they blocked a single swipe! They went back with a few words of encouragement regarding their need to improve them!
Next was 10 card sleeves for less than £3 on an online marketplace - did they work? Well yes, only if I placed the swipe card in the middle of the pile of 10! 😂 What annoys me is that gadget retailers likely sell something as ineffective for North of a fiver each (as well as potentially ripping off the person buying it, it also can give them a false sense of security)! 🫣
Certain OTT members have caused me to add this disclaimer: all advice given is free of charge & as such should be taken to be IIRC (as I don't spend hours researching all answers :eek: )!0 -
It comes as no surprise that many small business accept only cash. My wife’s hairdresser will take cash only as she sites the high fees charged by card systems.
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Again, please do me the courtesy of referring to previous posts and read them fully - I already covered this.
Cash is MORE EXPENSIVE than cards for businesses, many people are ignorant of the true cost of cash and see only the single upfront fee of cards and think that means it's too expensive. Cards are cheaper than cash in almost every scenario, particularly if they are honest and not trying to avoid tax.
At the very least, they lose the business of the significant majority who pay by card and never carry cash and will simply take their business to the next store - that isn't even a visible cost as they never see the loss of income let alone the significant cost of both personal time and necessary procedures for security etc
Sam Vimes' Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness:
People are rich because they spend less money. A poor man buys $10 boots that last a season or two before he's walking in wet shoes and has to buy another pair. A rich man buys $50 boots that are made better and give him 10 years of dry feet. The poor man has spent $100 over those 10 years and still has wet feet.
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Best thing to do is just stack the cards, the card readers cannot activate without being a couple of mm away and cannot read from multiple cards!
Sam Vimes' Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness:
People are rich because they spend less money. A poor man buys $10 boots that last a season or two before he's walking in wet shoes and has to buy another pair. A rich man buys $50 boots that are made better and give him 10 years of dry feet. The poor man has spent $100 over those 10 years and still has wet feet.
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I have very little faith in HMRC fraud investigations. I reported a previous employer for Corporation Tax fraud, VAT fraud, personal tax fraud and false accounting. I send them all the documents detailing it multiple times, including email trails between the owner and the accountant planning it all out (where they specifically mentioned committing fraud), I sent these multiple times, including the updated versions because the fraud was ongoing. After three years HMRC sent a VAT inspector who sat in a meeting room, drunk tea, ate biscuits and chatted to the accountant for four hours, before looking at five invoices that were of no relevance and leaving.
In the town where I live there are four Turkish barbers which despite rarely having any customers are all turning over more than £4,000,000 a year according to their companies house records.
I have tradesmen friends who are regularly asked "how much for cash" with people getting angry when they will not do the work cheaper for non-banking payments, almost always by potential customers operating cash businesses themselves.
As a business cash is expensive, a lot more expensive than card, the card fees for small businesses are 1-1.2%, for multinationals they are less than 1%. Cash costs in banking fees, change fees, handling errors, time, higher insurance costs, even the fees alone are higher than the processing fees for cards, let alone before one adds in the errors, time and insurance costs.
The issue with the tax system in the UK is that the Personal Allowance is far too large (well above any of our international peers apart from the US) and we have the most complicated and lengthy tax system in the world, which creates excessive bureaucracy and huge amounts of loopholes.
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That's a good point, there have been lots of occasions where I have encountered cash only places and I've just gone somewhere else that takes card. If they had something I really wanted then I'd have gone and got cash, but it most cases I wasn't bothered where it can from and just got it from somewhere that makes paying easier.
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I have my bus pass and my two “go to” credit cards in my phone case along with an RFID card. I prefer actual cards to using my phone as I invariably have trouble with tech. In another purse I’ve got bank, loyalty cards and a bit of cash along with another RFID card. The blocking cards I have I tested before using and they did appear to work. So I feel I’ve done all I can, I just have to be hopeful!
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