CASH NO LONGER KING IN A NUMBER OF BUSINESSES
site. “We travel a lot for work,” she said, gesturing to a colleague, “and if they don’t take credit cards that makes things difficult.”
On the other side are those who were raised to equate credit-card spending with taking on debt — something to be avoided whenever possible, and reserved in any case for major expenditures. Those people do things like grab a $5 bill from their purse and run down from their office to the place on the corner thinking that they can buy a snack with it. They will catch on eventually.
“I was shocked,” said David, a 66-year-old accountant who popped into Dig Inn for lunch a few hours before Bryant. (He declined to give his surname because “I’m a private person.”) “This is very unusual to me.”not surprisingly, the credit card companies, who make a commission on every credit card purchase, applaud the trend. Visa recently offered select merchants a $10,000 reward for depriving customers of their right to pay by the method of their choice. A Visa executive described this practice to CNN as offering shoppers “freedom from carrying cash.”
How is this even allowed? Doesn’t the dollar bill say it’s “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” The Federal Reserve’s website says that notwithstanding that language, there is no federal law compelling a business “to accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.”
Asked why the $8.71 a customer owes for that Turmeric Sweet Potato Hummus Toast she just ordered is not considered a debt, the Federal Reserve offered a partial explanation, but it begins with the words “for purposes of illustration, and not for attribution to the Fed,” so we cannot share the rest. But a professor at New York University School of Law who teaches contract and commercial law, Clayton Gillette, laid it out.
First of all, he said, you don’t have a debt until after you receive a good or a service. What about at a sit-down restaurant, where you pay after you eat? “Assuming the restaurant lets you know up front that they don’t take cash, they’re offering to serve you a meal, but they are offering it on their terms,” Gillette said. “If you consume the meal, you’ve accepted the terms of the contract.”
Still, occasionally, the Luddites win. A couple of weeks ago, Lisa Gaytan, 60, and a friend walked into a Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream store in Brooklyn. Her friend ordered a vegan chocolate cone. He was told he could not pay with cash. He handed over his credit card. There was a problem with the card reader, or maybe the Wi-fi. In any case, the machine was down. The cashier apologized and said the ice cream was on the house.
“My thought was, sometimes the analog world works better than the digital,” Gaytan said. “We both walked out of there saying, ‘That was crazy.’”