Cash

[TallPaul]

Can we please not 'suggest' why someone would prefer to pay for their grocery shopping by cash.

[BurlyBeaR]

Nov 27, 2024 17:47:42 GMT jake said:

At a slight tangent (MODS: feel free to delete if this looks too much like advertising

Very happy for you to share your love of B&M as long as it’s on topic, but “MODS” even in upper case will not bring either myself or TallPaul to your assistance (I only happened to see your post as I flew by on my broomstick). 

Any member wanting to attract mod attention needs to tag us.
To tag me type @ admin (but without the space after @)
For his nibs type @ pdc1 (but without the space after @)

Theres a handy reminder of this in my signature below ⬇️

[jake]

Nov 27, 2024 17:54:24 GMT TallPaul said:

Can we please not 'suggest' why someone would prefer to pay for their grocery shopping by cash.

Thanks.  I'm not one to report a post but I have to say I find it gratuitously aggressive to suggest that I might have been advocating and/or indulging in tax evasion.  Especially as I have already said I think tax evasion/money laundering etc is a problem that needs to be dealt with and really unconnected with the way people pay for their groceries.  Frankly, I was quite baffled by the post.  If it was meant to be funny, I'm afraid I didn't get the joke

[jake]

Nov 27, 2024 18:01:09 GMT BurlyBeaR said:

Nov 27, 2024 17:47:42 GMT jake said:

At a slight tangent (MODS: feel free to delete if this looks too much like advertising

Very happy for you to share your love of B&M as long as it’s on topic, but “MODS” even in upper case will not bring either myself or TallPaul to your assistance (I only happened to see your post as I flew by on my broomstick). 

Any member wanting to attract mod attention needs to tag us.
To tag me type @ admin (but without the space after @)
For his nibs type @ pdc1 (but without the space after @)

Theres a handy reminder of this in my signature below ⬇️

Sorry, I'm going to seem very slow here; but when I'm composing a post and I want to 'tag' someone, where do I put the text.  is it just BurlyBeaR anywhere in the body of my post?

[BurlyBeaR]

Nov 27, 2024 18:10:18 GMT jake said:

Nov 27, 2024 18:01:09 GMT BurlyBeaR said:

Very happy for you to share your love of B&M as long as it’s on topic, but “MODS” even in upper case will not bring either myself or TallPaul to your assistance (I only happened to see your post as I flew by on my broomstick). 

Any member wanting to attract mod attention needs to tag us.
To tag me type @ admin (but without the space after @)
For his nibs type @ pdc1 (but without the space after @)

Theres a handy reminder of this in my signature below ⬇️

Sorry, I'm going to seem very slow here; but when I'm composing a post and I want to 'tag' someone, where do I put the text.  is it just BurlyBeaR anywhere in the body of my post?

Yes, exactly that. Just like you did above. 

[jake]

Nov 27, 2024 18:31:10 GMT BurlyBeaR said:

Nov 27, 2024 18:10:18 GMT jake said:

Sorry, I'm going to seem very slow here; but when I'm composing a post and I want to 'tag' someone, where do I put the text.  is it just BurlyBeaR anywhere in the body of my post?

Yes, exactly that. Just like you did above. 

Thanks.

[Dawnstar]

Nov 27, 2024 17:48:24 GMT Phantom of London said:

You kind of lost me, when you said ‘I more often feel frustrated by cards that don’t work’ when does this ever happen

Possibly it is the problem I referred to above whereby "contactless" cards frequently refuse to work contactlessly & one has to put in one's PIN instead. I am frequently stuck hovering my card over the card reader with nothing happening since the machine doesn't usually bother to tell me I need to enter my PIN, it just doesn't do anything. The shop assistant usually tells me to try again or re-sends the transaction to the machine before I eventually have to insert my card & PIN.

[jake]

Nov 27, 2024 20:05:31 GMT Dawnstar said:

Nov 27, 2024 17:48:24 GMT Phantom of London said:

You kind of lost me, when you said ‘I more often feel frustrated by cards that don’t work’ when does this ever happen

Possibly it is the problem I referred to above whereby "contactless" cards frequently refuse to work contactlessly & one has to put in one's PIN instead. I am frequently stuck hovering my card over the card reader with nothing happening since the machine doesn't usually bother to tell me I need to enter my PIN, it just doesn't do anything. The shop assistant usually tells me to try again or re-sends the transaction to the machine before I eventually have to insert my card & PIN.

That's one of the things I notice and I mentioned it in my post.  But another thing I see is people presenting a phone or chip and pin and being told it hasn't gone through. Sometimes it's because they've put it in the wrong way but sometimes, too, the machine just won't have it despite the customer's protestations that the p.i.n. is correct and there's plenty in the account.  I don't presume to doubt them because it's happened to me at self-checkouts.  I've had the message 'transaction declined' when I know I've done everything right.  Last time it repeatedly gave this message and I ended up putting the shopping through another checkout which promptly accepted the card first time.  If it happens to me - and I seldom use a card at a supermarket - I don't feel inclined to doubt other people when they say it's the store's/bank's equipment. Only last week a customer in front of me had to leave the checkout and go to the store's ATM to get cash on the same card the checkout was rejecting.

PS In my case it was chip and pin - by choice I don't have a contactless chip on my card.

[Phantom of London]

I was in a sandwich bar that had ‘cash only’ in the window, I was put off that the person was handling both cash and food, well didn’t handle my food I was on my toes.

[aspieandy]

Nov 27, 2024 12:57:00 GMT mkb said:

The widespread use of cash to avoid tax and proper accountability is in my view a far more serious problem, and that is why cash needs to be consigned to history. It's also an expensive system. (Merchant/bank fees on cards are expensive too, but they really should not be. That's an area where the EU made some progress but needs to go further.)

We are approaching an era where it would be reasonable to allow retailers to pass on their cash-handling costs by way of a surcharge on cash transactions. They are currently not allowed to do that, so what you see instead is businesses becoming cashless to avoid those costs.

For those in a wealth bubble struggling to understand the consequences of the array of marvels that has been the Austerity and Magic Money Tree policies, together with the (low skilled) open borders and cost of living crises:

Shoppers back to using cash to budget, say retailers

Cash use in the shops rose for a second year in a row after a decade of falls, according to retailers.

Notes and coins were used in a fifth of transactions last year, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said, as shoppers found cash helped them to budget better.

The amount spent per purchase also dropped slightly from £22.43 in 2022, to £22.03 last year, it said.

The findings were published after charities told a committee of MPs that numerous groups were excluded from essential services and community venues that had started to refuse cash.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1el81lenq1o

Further down the economic ladder, this is at a time when the Trussell Trust is reporting >>

End of year stats

More than 3.1 million emergency food parcels were distributed by Trussell’s community of food banks in the past 12 months – the most parcels ever distributed in a year and nearly double the number compared to five years ago.

Fortunately, you don't need even cash for a foodbank.

Some of you will, of course, be seeing all this on your bluesky feed.

www.trussell.org.uk/news-and-research/latest-stats/end-of-year-stats

[theatrelover97]

There is a Lidi not far from me opening soon and it is apparently going to be card only. Can't see that being popular- all the supermarkets near me tend to have much longer quues for cash tills than card ones.

[jake]

Dec 11, 2024 15:59:18 GMT theatrelover97 said:

There is a Lidi not far from me opening soon and it is apparently going to be card only. Can't see that being popular- all the supermarkets near me tend to have much longer quues for cash tills than card ones.

Are you sure?  That's very counter-intuitive.  I don't think Aldi, Lidl, Home Bargains, B&M etc would last very long around here if they refused to take cash.  Aldi & Lidl typically devote half the self-checkouts to 'card only' with the staffed checkouts accepting cash and card.  As you observe, the queues are much longer for those that take cash.  That, of course, is partly because there are no 'cash only' checkouts any more so the ones that take cash also serve card users; but the fact that there are long queues while card checkouts stand idle gives the lie to the suggestion that few choose to pay cash these days.  The only completely cashless supermarkets I've seen are those Amazon Fresh places -which always seem to be empty when I walk past. That might be because of the time of day I tend to walk past - but one of them is next door to a Sainsbury's Local, which seems to have a healthy number of customers in it.