Cash is not welcome at some US businesses
New York’s eateries in the vanguard of the generational change
“and if they don’t take 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-yearold accountant who popped into Dig Inn for lunch a few hours before Bryant. “This is very unusual to me.”
Tim McLoughlin, 59, a writer in Brooklyn, did a double-take when he walked into a Bluestone Lane branch in Brooklyn. “My reaction was ‘A New York City restaurant that records all its revenue? How can they stay in business?’ ”
They can, and do. At Pokee, a poke-salad place in Greenwich Village, cash is treated like a quarantinable substance. “If you have exact change, we’ll take it,” said the woman behind the counter. “We give it to the manager and he puts it in a safe. Because we don’t have a register.”
Welcome trend
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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.”
This freedom is good for the consumer, good for business, and good for the planet, the new breed of eateries insist. At Dos Toros, a Mexican chain that is in the process of going cashless at its 13 New York City locations, the co-CEO Leo Kremer said that cash took up precious time: The time of the general manager of the location, who spent a couple of hours a day counting (and recounting) cash drawers that could have been spent coaching new employees and making sure customers have a great experience.
“There’s something fundamentally demoralising when you have the leader of the restaurant back in the office, counting, instead of out on the floor,” he said. And it took up the time of the customer: Cash causes bottlenecks at the register, he said.
Kremer said that only a minuscule portion of customers complained about the cashless policy, but there are enough of them for the employees to notice. “Every day I have an argument with somebody about it,” said a cashier at the Dos Toros on 40th Street. “I don’t make these rules, you know.”
But wait, 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 Boerum Hill, 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 apologised and said the ice cream was on the house.
“My thought was, sometimes the analogue world works better than the digital,” Gaytan said. “We both walked out of there saying, ‘That was crazy.’”