Visa and Mastercard are American companies, and they essentially tax everybody by taking a percentage of purchase prices for themselves. Not exactly a small percentage either, 1.2% to 2.65%. Ever wonder why so many merchants say they don’t accept American Express? That’s because they charge quite a bit more to merchantes, 50% more than Visa or Mastercard. Anyway, we’re letting American companies tax us and we love them because we get rewards when we use cards. But it’s just a shell game because we pay more up front because businesses need to charge more to make up for payment processing charges. They get to sit in the middle and rake in the money.
Now the alternative in Canada is Interac. Interac charges a set amount per transcation. How much? 2 to 5.5 cents. Unless you’re going through Apple or Google Pay, and then it’s a percentage again.
Interac is also Canadian.
Want to stick it to Trump? Stop using credit cards (and Google Pay or Apple Pay) and switch to Interac. Want to make Canada better? Stop using credit cards and switch to Interac. Is it going to be inconvenient? Yes. Online shopping will be much harder but I have seen online Interac payments before and we can ask our favourite Canadian merchants to accept Interac online.
I work for an American credit card company, and my advice is to ditch credit and debit cards entirely. Use cash.
Credit cards (when used correctly) is one of the few pro consumer products we have left.
Most cards come with fraud protection, something you cannot get with cash, checks, or gift cards.
Similarly, most cards come with purchase protections like extended warranties. I have a credit card that gives me free damage protection on my cell phone so long as I pay the monthly bill with it.
I’m not saying cash isn’t great but there are good reasons to use a credit card. At least for now.
I don’t think those benefits are worth it when you consider the cost of having your purchase history and personal data for sale to anyone who wants it.
Yeah one of the few fixes to our shitty situation is to end surveillance capitalism. It’s deconstructing our behaviors trending them and exploiting them vs ourselves and the people around us.
Cash becomes a component of a healthy surveillance free (ish) lifestyle. But you probably wouldn’t be posting on any internet site if you were all in on it enough for swapping over to cash to matter. haha.
Eh, the job comes with certain expectations, they don’t even have cash tills in the cafeteria.
I use my credit cards just enough to generate a plausibly normal profile, and cash for everything else.
I’ve been looking for a more ethical job, but the market for tech work is real fucked up right now…
As another American who works in the industry, it’s a wedding cake of frighteningly bad software piled on top of well-intentioned but poorly implemented mandates piled on top of willful ignorance frosted with solving problems people don’t actually have. And the little couple on top are both the capitalist pigman from a 1930s Soviet poster that we all recognize thanks to Hexbear :`(
I prefer cash too.
Good info from the inside, thanks. I had some money in a Digital Payments ETF but I recently dumped it and moved the money to a European fund instead. This makes me feel a bit better about that decision.
I would love to hear your side of things. Cash is better for curbing impulse spending and it is of course anonymous but it is inconvenient. I feel like there’s a target on my back when I walk around with more than a couple hundred dollars.
If enough people know you’re carrying that much cash for it to be a potential issue, you’ve got other security issues that should honestly be your priority.
There also is no middle-man with cash.
My personal opinion is that the convenience isn’t worth the unspoken costs, much less the overt ones. Credit card processors already charge merchant fees on top of the interest charged by the banks that issue those cards, but they also get all your personal data associated with that card. It’s more than enough to be worth selling to advertisers, so anyone who cares to spend a few bucks can buy your purchase history and build a profile. Name, address, contact info, the coffee shop you visit regularly and when you can be found there, the daycare you send your kids to, etc. It’s very not-safe, especially when the government decides your type of person is now unpersoned.
More fundamentally though, I think the problem comes down to money itself. The use of any form of currency as both a store of value and a medium of exchange creates a multitude of perverse incentives to the detriment of society. Families work best when money isn’t coming between them, and I think that principle is generalizable to our species as a whole.
The Guardian published a story today about how Sweden’s move to a cashless society is backfiring on them.
Well, when on business trips, I can’t just have a bunch of cash with me, so I could pay for hotels and every eventuality
Is there any way around that?
Best I can think of is taking a traveler’s check to a local bank or currency exchange.
Hm…ok, thanks
I’ll evaluate my alternatives
Also, sometimes buying something online, because I quickly need the hardware, only really works with credit cards.
All though real time money transfers at least start to speed up the traditional way …
Checkbooks exist for a reason.
Ok now, let’s not go bringing back that nonsense. Cash is fine. You’re no more likely to be robbed than usual because you’re carrying a lot, and you can do what I do. If you need to carry a lot of money in cash, put $49 in your wallet and the rest in your sock.
I have carried $100-500 sometimes as high as $2k in my wallet for decades without a problem. Usually on the lower end of the 100-500 range unless I think I’ll need it.
This might be a problem for someone who can’t hold onto their belongings and leaves a trail of lost things everywhere they go. It might also be a problem for someone who lives in an area with high petty crime where they can expect to get jumped every once in a while. This is unlikely to be a problem for most people in the US states and European countries I’ve spent time in. Even in Argentina, which is not the safest place, I use cash exclusively.
As others have mentioned, when it starts getting into that $500-$1k range, you always have checks, wire transfers, Western Union, etc. I’m not selling out my privacy for a $5 bagel if I can help it.
Canadian debit cards are very different than American cards.