Cash? That’s mighty suspicious…
When it comes to banks, nothing is free.
Allowing customers to use a credit card is just part of the cost of doing business for a merchant. A cost they pass on to their customers in aggregate.
The merchants don’t care if you use cash, credit, or debit, because the cost to them for your using a credit card is fully accounted for. All of your fellow customers who don’t have the option to make every purchase on their 5% cash back rewards card and pay their balance in full every month are subsidizing your privilege.
This is another example of the system arranging for the least well-off to make life easier for their “betters.”
Plastic cards are the coin of the realm in modern society and it’s just a fact of life that credit/debit systems are here to stay and will continue to grow in popularity as we move away from cash. The POS interfaces installed by merchants to make debit transactions more convenient disguises the fact that this type of payment carries risks to the cardholder that credit purchases don’t have. It behooves us to be better educated on the differences.
The bottom line is that (in most instances) credit cards are an overall better choice for making purchases versus a debit card. I am simply pointing out that when faced with the decision to choose credit or debit at the checkout line, it’s a smarter choice to pick credit even though it has a few extra steps involved.
As a consumer, I don’t give a rat’s ass about a merchants’ cost of doing business. There are hundreds of hidden costs that are passed along to customers in the aggregate that subsidizes one privilege or another - I can’t help that. At the end of the day I choose the payment method that offers the most protection and that which makes the best financial sense to me personally. If others have difficulty controlling their spending and need the self imposed discipline that debit cards provide then yes, that’s a better choice for that particular spending behavior.
Boing Boing, detecting prole racism since 2003!
Yeah, isn’t that totally fucked up…
Also, the likes stuff is changed? When did that happen?
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Part of the reason the market I go to doesn’t accept credit cards - it cuts costs. They only take debit, check, or cash. I kind of like that.
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How is the likes stuff changed??
The “Like” list is now a button on the left side of each post in the same style as the “# Replies” button. I liked the old “Like” counter better. The new one is too easy to confuse with the button to show replies. It even has a dropdown chevron on it.
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I was familiar in general terms with the fact that ‘POS’ means more than ‘point of sale’; but I’m honestly rather surprised to hear that they are so touchy about latency. Given that credit cards reasonably substantially predate ubiquitous retail computers, and were often used without any real-time verification(at least for smaller merchants and relatively low value purchases); and with even fairly fancy operations running over dial-up until pretty recently; I’d have expected much more robust support for less-than-entirely-real-time operation.
That isn’t to say that 300ms typical; with north of 800ms frequent isn’t utterly pitiful; but my naive expectation would have been that, having descended from a system that was substantially offline, with occasional batch verification, the contemporary systems would be a bit less touchy about having to wait a second.
Out of curiosity, do you know if it’s a security related thing, some sort of concern over replay or race-condition attacks, or whether some optimist who did all his firmware testing on the same LAN as the auth server just couldn’t imagine why anyone who isn’t still throwing spears for a living could possibly need to handle high ping?
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Aside from that being an utterly asshole move(and presumably based on the assumption that you were up for a little bonding over being better than them, which is pretty forward); hasn’t the ‘Cadillac’ brand actually been around long enough, and experienced enough ups and downs in popularity, that there are a fair number of used beaters that are ‘cadillacs’; but whose owners probably desperately wish that they were Japanese econoboxes with better mileage and mechanical reliability?
There are certainly specific cadillac models that are ‘luxury’(or at least expensive); but I’ve seen a fair few that may have been expensive a decade or two ago; but not so much now.
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Yes, I see now, it is disconcerting, but I imagine I’ll get used to it quick enough.
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Noooo! I demand the button is moved!
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Anyone who uses a credit card for consumables, i.e.: food, tobacco, gas, booze, etc. is wrong.
Why is that wrong?
I am white and have experienced this type of failure with many types of cards. Maybe it wasn’t til the 3rd failure she realized something must be wrong. Or maybe those were her instructions. It is deliberately devisive to make every incident skin color based. I will bet this happened, by the odds, in twelve different stores at the same time with a variety of skin colors involved.
The timing issues are a part of the security measures built into the cards. There’s a time limit a transaction much take place within, otherwise transactions could be “paused” indefinitely while stuff like the PIN is brute-forced.
Hay! Wait a… Well its sorta… See there is a historical preci… Oh, you’re bullying us… Wait no… I HAD a black frien… We are trying our bes…
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I got nothin’. Awesome state if you like nature, farming, and hipsters though!!
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Anyone who consumes items such as food and gas a full month before paying for them is financially savvy, NOT wrong.
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