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Norway has an app called Vipps, released by the national bank. When first introduced it was primarily aimed towards payment from person to person, linked to phone numbers. But most online vendors accept it as a form of payment too.
I forgot my wallet while at the grocery store the other day, and using what little charm I have I managed to get the cashier to pay for me, and I Vippsed him the money owed.
And once again I look at a Scandinavian country with envy
In Brazil you can use a central bank system called pix. Everyone with a bank account has it. You can send money to any phone number registered on pix and everyone accepts it.
All banks support it so people can use it anywhere with anyone. Also we support a system like Japan with barcode but since pix people are using it less
Singapore has PayNow, Thailand has PromptPay, India has UPI… Just US/EU still struggling to get out from grip of mastercard/visa. Tho after Trump nonsense Eau is trying, but UK is not even trying.
Visa/MasterCard is a tax in every transaction. You might not see it but it is there.
I hate that I don’t get like a 2% cash discount, I get like 3%+ from credit cards so justifying cash is kind of hard
Wow, I had no idea you could do that in Japan, and the idea never crossed my mind.
That’s a brilliant solution to online payments.
@ontariobay in Brazil there is the PIX, it is an instant payment between almost any bank account, in the first year it was introduced you could use it to pay for almost anything, online or in person, it usually approves in less than a second and there is no fee.
Yes I remember reading about how US credit card companies are pissed about PIX which isn’t a surprise.
We now have the technological means to make online payments better in many ways for both customers and vendors. We just need to move away from one of the biggest American exports, middlemen.
How are we going to do that? What’s the payment method everyone should use for now?
You can even do this in Uniqlo when not in Japan. Make an online purchase, pay in store within 1 hour, and then it’s like you made an in-store purchase (with all the benefits).
I consulted for a luxury brand on e-commerce for a bit and I was surprised how important credit card splitting was to their American business.
Like, people splitting a purchase across multiple cards because they were so close to the max for each.
I questioned how much time we were spending on it but they assured me it was a common use case.
Note I recently had to do some gymnastics to split a purchase over ‘credit cards’ because I had received a few modest gift cards. I suspect that’s an even more common case, since people want to completely use up a received gift card and that’s all but impossible without splitting. Even if I have 10s of thousands of available limit, a gift card means I’m trying to spend like $50 or $100 out of a card.
I HATE gift cards. Kiddo got one for Nintendo. We have a hacked switch! Can’t even use it.
Have a Home Depot one that says “invalid” or whatever wording, won’t let me use it.
Basically buying a piece of plastic, they take your money and tell you to fuck off. No one’s going to take them to court for $50, so it’s win-win all around for them.
Regift it to someone who can use it
I did this ONCE on a $10k required purchase. Never again.
Interesting, usually when I get into something that expensive, they don’t even want to accept credit cards. I think most I got someone to take as a credit card transaction was about $6,000. They’ll only take check or certified check, or if a car then of course they really want you to borrow through whatever they have partnered with.
unfortunately, was for a lawyer. paid it off in two months, but didn’t quite have $10k i cash in my pocket. it wasn’t for a DUI, i don’t drink lmao. thats the most common reason for lawyers i’ve heard.
This kinda requires having a heavily consolidated convenience store industry with a lot of locations. Japan has both of these the US not so much. Urban sprawl, a physically larger country, and a culture of not using convenience stores as much kinda make this hard. Also said stores would likely need to register AML and KYC controls.
People do heavily use gas stations which are about the same thing
True. This is one thing we still need to buy in person, and can’t have delivered, so gas stations exist even in the smallest towns.
The other place, of course, is grocery stores. I can pay in cash at the self-checkout in Walmart, and the machines scan barcodes. So, that’s another option.
Would post office work better for US?
We used to have postal banking - this is a very good argument to bring it back
Maybe. The lines in my local post office are always long but they do exist. I can’t come up with an easy way for the Comstock act to prohibit it being used for adult material but then again I don’t work for the “Heritage” Foundation.
Then again Congress likes it’s puritannical laws and would need to create such a service.
At first, I was only thinking about the ubiquity of post offices and that they already reach rural areas. But the government aspect does add a bit more too. Feels like it’s official to use government currency in a government building instead of a local convenience store.
Honestly this type of transaction seems like it could easily be an automated kiosk. Scan barcode / QR code. Insert cash. Get receipt. Employees nearby to help if needed. Done
Kiosk could work, but I could see that thing being perpetually broken after a few months of (mis)use.
It also requires not being dominated by people who think lack of options is a feature they can exploit and would happily destroy society if it meant that whatever was left was more dependent on them (partially to profit from it, partially to hold the keys to control who can access it and how).
I don’t exclusively use cash but I won’t buy from any business that won’t let me use cash if I choose to. I also do basically zero online shopping for this reason.
I wish I could pay in cash for online purchases from Amazon. Amazon has such a privacy nightmare that I cannot even hide or delete my purchase history. I know deleting the history doesn’t remove the trait or nullify anything, but the fact that it remains visible on your account is stupid. There are purchases that I dont want anyone looking at my account to know and sometimes I just like clearing it. I don’t care for shit I bought back in 2018 anymore.
Any better alternatives?
In the BeNeLux we have bol.com, a local alternative to amazon because amazon didn’t want to comply to our laws.
I use guest account on ebay. Works fine
Ebay is paypal and super evil too.
Alternate account?
No. In Sweden, 99% of all payments are cahsless. Most stores don’t even take cash anymore.
We still have plenty of (digital) options for payment in addition to Visa/Mastercard.
In my view, it’s actually the opposite. The more digital paymenst are used, the higher the incentive to create a competing payment solution. Swish and Klarna are taking over more and more here.
I thought klarna was just a payday loan basically?
The destruction of cash in the EU is jusy disgusting. I dont want to have to leave a paper trail for everything.
There are digital payment schemes that would be completely anonymous for the vast majority of consumers, like GNU Taler. Support an implementation of it in your country. Cash is dying because of how inconvenient it is, we must build something that has the convenience of digital payments while also preserving privacy, there’s no other way.
That would be ideal, but the people in office and their corporate overlords want to know every single breath we take. It will be hard to gain that right and easy to lose it.
Right, there’s no permanent solution to this issue while the working class is not in control of the state, because ultimately it’s the state which sets the value of fiat currency. If we win the fight to get a Taler-like system recognized as an official one, it would be as difficult to get rid of it as it is to ban cash right now.
Could be an alibi if you ever get in major trouble, lookup the transaction, match to security footage, prove you weren’t there.
I don’t have to prove I wasn’t there. They have to prove I was.
So if someone is lying and says you were? Mistaken identity? Easy fix if you show you weren’t where the crime took place.
You have a lot of trust in “the system”.
In Canada we have Interac E-transfer for transferring funds from our standard chequing accounts to private businesses or people we’re buying things off of. We also have “virtual credit cards” that are just a CC number with an exp date and CVV that we can use for online purchases and that money comes out of our regular back account without the need for a credit account.
Most people still have and use Credit Cards but we are far less reliant on them here. Most of them time if someone has one it’s for the perks that card gives, like cash back on purchases or points for rewards like gift cards, tools, vacations, etc.
We also have “virtual credit cards” that are just a CC number with an exp date and CVV that we can use for online purchases and that money comes out of our regular back account without the need for a credit account.
So, like, a debit card?
No, as you cannot use your debit card for online credit card interactions.
You can’t use a debit card to buy things off Amazon.
You absolutely can, I did so this week.
That’s a new one for me. I didn’t realize in some countries you can’t use a debit card on Amazon. To be clear, I’m not talking about an ATM card, I’m talking about a debit card with a Visa or MasterCard logo.
what why??
Must be a regional thing, because no such restriction exists in the US
Funny that, since I said in my OP, I’m Canadian.
I was thinking that I definitely knew there were some European countries that are more cashless than the US.
I wonder where that puritan far right “women’s rights” advocacy group is now that Twitter is generating CSAM and non consensual AI generated material, or maybe the purpose was always to punch down on independent artists.
They are actively pushing against every attempt to stop Twitter and it’s owner Mask producing child pornography and non-consentually showing it to the users. That’s where they are right now.
That genuinely doesn’t surprise me, what an absolutely reactionary organization
Makes me wonder: how are they not have the same stronghold in Europe? They’re also everywhere there as well.
They do, but people also do a lot of bank transfers. Which is essentially a cash payment. But if you don’t have a local bank account and app, or the Wise app, then credit cards work just fine most places.
Albania is the only place I’ve seen that has zero trust in anything but cash, but that’s because their socialist era was so restrictive that after that regime fell, people were wholly unable to understand how basic things like banks or economics works. A single pyramid scheme basically crashed the government in 1996-97. It’s a fascinating story about how much learning a society has to do to change from an oppressive regime to something else.
The EU caps interchange fees iirc so its not as profitable for VISA. We did the same for debit cards in the USA which is why credit cards became even more pushed
In the Netherlands we have iDeal, which will be turned into an European standard soon
There is this herbal thing that the fda was trying to shut down in a fact free reefer madness esque type campaign, kratom, that endangered drug company profits by amongst other things allowing people to wean themselves off opioids by taking the edge of withdrawals with it. Big business.
Anyway after failing because people in the west organized to defend their rights, the FDA leaned on the credit card companies to not process their transactions. The companies found some out of the country vendor that was willing to process them before long but for a short bit people had to use electronic checks. Which banks are funny about, no one knows how untrustworthy banks are like other banks I figure.
But idk the vendor, the visa and mastercard both work on this. But I’ve heard of the government doing this a couple of times since, and some private church group doing it to steam to get them to remove some game or something.
That’s really interesting I never heard about how kratom was used like that.
Yeah it hits the opiate receptors, not directly though. It hits the kappa, and hits delta ones sideways. In effect it’s like codeine, 1/10 morphine strength, but the half life is shorter, a couple of hours, and it is unpleasant after getting a certain amount. But it doesn’t by itself hurt you or any organ system or do any damage to the body. In SE Asia where it’s native, this relative of the coffee tree is used by locals that chew it’s leaves.
It is rather pleasant but very mild, a poor substitute for opiates, but it will cure withdrawals, and you don’t need a permission slip from a doctor to get it, or to buy overpriced medication like suboxone that without insurance can be super overpriced if you can’t get on a discount deal of some kind I hear, I’ve never been on it. But also no medical record of being a junkie either.
Well you know the saying, the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago. Live your life dude.
