Visa/MasterCard is a tax in every transaction. You might not see it but it is there.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
1236 points (99.8% liked)
Curated Tumblr
6389 readers
1516 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:
-
FOSS Android Recs per u/m_f@discuss.online: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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 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.
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 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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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.
load more comments
(4 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
view more: next ›