Items here now won't be there then

[MikeFromLFE]

I've just encountered my first 'card minimum spend' in a long time. I was in Barton-on-Humber (please don't ask why) and Mrs M spotted a sweet shop where she assumed I could buy her some sherbet lemons.
The assistant emptied the jar and it came to about £3 - I proffered my phone, to be told it was a £5 minimum. So I waved the cobwebs out of my wallet.
Seems fair, but it's increasingly uncommon.

[Cudzoziemiec]

£5 is high. Last one I encountered, a couple of weeks ago, was £3. It's almost always in little shops where you might go in to just buy a couple of sherbet lemons (I wanted to buy a lighter, camping stove for the lighting of, which cost 60p – I couldn't find anything else I wanted to buy, so borked out a fiver).

[chrisbainbridge]

Our local shop is !2 which allows me to buy the paper. I will often just walk out unless I am desperate.

[rafletcher]

I've not encountered any minimum payments around here for a long time (even the farm shop has dropped it £5 minimum) - but then the only thing I've bought that was <£3 is eggs from one of our neighbours, and for that we use cash. I guess prices have just compensated.

[Polar Bear]

Smaller businesses, especially those which have many low value sales are hit hard by transaction fees.  The choices are to raise prices or set a transaction minimum.  Seems extremely reasonable to me.

[ian]

The fees have dropped a lot, the little PoS terminals you can buy and connect to your phone are usually competitively priced. It's rare to see a transaction limit in my experience, I spent 60p on card in a corner shop yesterday. Cash itself has its own costs.

That said, the greasy spoon I went to on Saturday is still defiantly cash only (though they trusted us enough to let us eat the food and give them the money later).

[Polar Bear]

The fees may have dropped a lot but they are still fees.  If you are conducting hundreds of small transactions in a day even a small fee adds up. 

[ian]

Indeed, but there are costs for doing everything. Going to the bank and dropping off cash isn't free either.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The terminals might be cheap, but it's the banks levying the fees. Like PB says, it's the small shops which probably have many low-value sales that levy them. And I don't suppose the banks levy the same fees for everyone.

[grams]

I instinctively avoid small shops because of the unknowability of their card situation from outside, which is a bit shit.

Going to the bank and dropping off cash isn't free either.

If you're running a small business on tiny margins, any labour you can do yourself rather than paying someone else is profit.

[mrcharly-YHT]

MrsC has set up a SumUp account and purchased a terminal.

Seems to work in a very similar way to Paypal. Fees for seller are on moving the money out of the SumUp account.

I presume SumUp are leveraging the large collective amounts of cash for trading and investments.

I'm wrong. They charge the seller a fixed percentage on transaction (1.69%).

Low enough that it doesn't really bite.

[ian]

The PoS my wife's orchestra uses has a flat 1.75% transaction fee (I think there's an additional 10p flat fee for credit cards).

Anyway, it's not an argument about cash versus card, there are always costs for running a business – from cashing up and taking cash to the bank (indeed, if you're a small shop, there's always risk in having cash on the premises), stocking the shelves, throwing out the rubbish, etc. etc. In my experience, they mostly seem to be absorbing the charges.

[Polar Bear]

Indeed, but there are costs for doing everything. Going to the bank and dropping off cash isn't free either.

Quite so but it's predictable and your own time.   Also, the smaller you are as a business the higher your fees will be.  The normal rules of supply and demand operate even in the finance sector.  And, merchants have to pay monthly for the epos kit too which is yet another expense.  It all adds up.

Cash is not dead yet in spite of the attempts of the £££banks£££ and $big$cos to gan ever more control over your spending and your data.  And given how this corrupt government is about to trash GDPR and de-protect personal data, I'll keep the cash handy thanks.

[Woofage]

Card minimums are an odd thing. Totally understandable from the retailer's pov. But as more and more people don't carry cash (or card) they're going to have an influence on our shopping habits. Maybe people will become more and more inclined to just suck it up, as indeed they might postage, or maybe more and more bundling of purchases – but difficult cos card minimums only really hit when all you wanted was (tempting fate) a pint of milk – or maybe in the long run the retailers will have to suck it up.

I think we'll see them go as they're a hangover from now obsolete charging schemes. Until recently*, DC transactions were charged as a fee and CCs a %. It's all % now (actually a bit lower for DC) so no actual need for a minimum spend.

* a handful of years, can't remember how many.

[ian]

Credit card still has a fixed 10p fee (+1.75%) on the system I'm familiar with, there's no fixed fee for debit cards. That's, of course, for a small entity, if you're a bigger merchant, those terms may be different. I've not read the T&Cs.

But anyway, in my experience, the majority of small shops now take cards and for any amount.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Wasn't the law changed a couple of years ago to allow for differential charging debit v credit card? And presumably cash too. But I've never actually come across this in use.

[rafletcher]

Indeed, but there are costs for doing everything. Going to the bank and dropping off cash isn't free either.

Quite so but it's predictable and your own time.   Also, the smaller you are as a business the higher your fees will be.  The normal rules of supply and demand operate even in the finance sector.  And, merchants have to pay monthly for the epos kit too which is yet another expense.  It all adds up.

Cash is not dead yet in spite of the attempts of the £££banks£££ and $big$cos to gan ever more control over your spending and your data.  And given how this corrupt government is about to trash GDPR and de-protect personal data, I'll keep the cash handy thanks.

That's more about you than the system though. Our local card and geegaw shop has actively discouraged cash since the start of lockdown, much preferring contactless.  The only cash only business I can think of is the sandwich  delivery to work - but thats because it's a pre-order and each individual has to cough up the correct fee for the admin to pay to the van when it arrives. And in their shop, you can pay contactless.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Penny coins being produced again and contactless limit to rise to £100.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58560185
It strikes me that "hoarded at home" in the case of pennies means "can't be arsed to put them in my pocket".

[Kim]

It strikes me that "hoarded at home" in the case of pennies means "can't be arsed to put them in my pocket".

Someone who shall remain nameless, but we'll refer to by the official honorific Fuckwit Wanker Pillock Twat, was in the habit of *binning* small change.  I mean, sure, there's always going to be some attrition as they get eaten by furniture or lost in the crevices of the car or swallowed by insufficiently well-briefed christmas pudding eaters or whatever, but shirley normal people just chuck them in a jar and fail to get round to doing anything with it.

I used to do special milk runs to the self-humiliation checkout at the local mini-Sainsbury's, which would accept heaps of mixed change, but that stopped at around the same time as I last went anywhere that might involve using cash.

[Cudzoziemiec]

1980s pop star Captain Sensible mentioned doing in an interview as evidence of how much richer he was going solo than singing with the Damned. I'm sure lots of far less rich people have been doing the same for a long time. There's very rarely a shortage of Fuckwit Wanker Pillock Twats.

[Mr Larrington]

I remember PJ O'Rourke writing of a pre-Unification trip to the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, when it was obligatory to change a certain quantity of perfectly good Deutschmarks into their well-nigh worthless but politically sound DDR equivalent.  And no, you weren’t allowed to take your Ostmarks away in case you planned to come back.  Unable to spend it, and despite the great pain suffered by any Republican doing something similar, he ended up throwing the East German currency in a bin.

[Jaded]

Indeed, but there are costs for doing everything. Going to the bank and dropping off cash isn't free either.

Quite so but it's predictable and your own time.   Also, the smaller you are as a business the higher your fees will be.  The normal rules of supply and demand operate even in the finance sector.  And, merchants have to pay monthly for the epos kit too which is yet another expense.  It all adds up.

Cash is not dead yet in spite of the attempts of the £££banks£££ and $big$cos to gan ever more control over your spending and your data.  And given how this corrupt government is about to trash GDPR and de-protect personal data, I'll keep the cash handy thanks.

Only in your own time if you are able to visit a bank during opening hours.

Banks have closed.

Here, in a three town triangle, two towns had one branch and 1 town had four. Naturally now two towns have no branches and 1 town still has four. A little bit of consideration forth market (and the realisation that it is possible to have 'centres' of the operation that are not profitable, whilst still being profitable overall could have meant 2 towns with one branch each and one with two.

10,000 more people would still have access to a bank. (Not 'access' which means a 15-20 minute drive, a parking fee, and a 15-20 minute driver back)

[ian]

I always put all the change (below an actual pound coin) in the charity box (I've never been convinced the contents of these boxes go to charity, but hey, it's the thought that counts). They'll be suffering now I've gone cashless.

I also dump left-over currency in those envelopes the airlines give you, though once I got home and worked out the exchange rate and realized I'd given them £73.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I remember PJ O'Rourke writing of a pre-Unification trip to the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, when it was obligatory to change a certain quantity of perfectly good Deutschmarks into their well-nigh worthless but politically sound DDR equivalent.  And no, you weren’t allowed to take your Ostmarks away in case you planned to come back.  Unable to spend it, and despite the great pain suffered by any Republican doing something similar, he ended up throwing the East German currency in a bin.

There was a similar rule in the Soviet Union. However, there's always a semi-official blind eye. So in Leningrad airport, in the departure lounge after passport control etc, there was a bar. Well what else would there be in a Russian airport? This bar only took rubles.

[Polar Bear]

Indeed, but there are costs for doing everything. Going to the bank and dropping off cash isn't free either.

Quite so but it's predictable and your own time.   Also, the smaller you are as a business the higher your fees will be.  The normal rules of supply and demand operate even in the finance sector.  And, merchants have to pay monthly for the epos kit too which is yet another expense.  It all adds up.

Cash is not dead yet in spite of the attempts of the £££banks£££ and $big$cos to gan ever more control over your spending and your data.  And given how this corrupt government is about to trash GDPR and de-protect personal data, I'll keep the cash handy thanks.

Only in your own time if you are able to visit a bank during opening hours.

Banks have closed.

Here, in a three town triangle, two towns had one branch and 1 town had four. Naturally now two towns have no branches and 1 town still has four. A little bit of consideration forth market (and the realisation that it is possible to have 'centres' of the operation that are not profitable, whilst still being profitable overall could have meant 2 towns with one branch each and one with two.

10,000 more people would still have access to a bank. (Not 'access' which means a 15-20 minute drive, a parking fee, and a 15-20 minute driver back)

Banking hours have always been restrictive anyway but I agree that they have got worse (I.e. been reduced) since covid.  And branch closures are a symptom of the drive to push people contactless.   It is estimated that between 1.3 and 2.4 million adults in the UK do not have a bank account primarily because they are not eligible and for some, never have been.   For these people cash is the only possible solution.  Now, I accept that they are a minority but they still need to buy food etc.  It will not come as a shock to learn that many of these are also homeless.

As a so-called civilised society we should never exclude the disadvantaged.