Cities and states around the country are banning stores from refusing to accept cash, and it’s a troubling trend for Amazon
- Stores that do not accept cash are on the rise, from quick-service lunch spots to Amazon's Go stores.
- Not accepting cash can speed up lines and make life easier for card-carrying consumers.
- But a backlash has grown, as the cashless trend leaves out lower-income customers who may not have a bank account.
- Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and New Jersey have already barred stores from rejecting cash as payment, and New York City and San Francisco are considering similar measures.
- This could affect the growth of Amazon's physical stores, which do not accept cash.
Cashless stores are becoming controversial.
See:
-
Under pressure Amazon plans to accept cash at cashless Go stores
-
Bank Customers Are Primed And Ready For Amazon
Stores that do not accept cash are on the rise, from quick-service lunch spots to Amazon's physical stores. Not accepting cash can speed up lines or eliminate them altogether, making life easier for card-carrying consumers.
Not everybody is on board with this cashless utopia, however. Backlash has started, as the cashless trend leaves out lower-income customers who may not have a bank account. As of last year, an estimated 15.6 million people in the US do not have a bank account.
Philadelphia barred stores from choosing not to accept cash in early March, becoming the first US city to do so.
"Most of the people who don't have credit tend to be lower income, minority, immigrants. It just seemed to me, if not intentional, at least a form of discrimination," Philadelphia City Councilman William Greenlee told the Wall Street Journal.
New Jersey later followed with its own measure, which Governor Phil Murphy signed into law on March 18.
"This idea of 'we don't want to accept cash' just marginalizes the poor, young people who haven't established credit yet, people who prefer to pay in cash," Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, a sponsor of the bill, told WNYC.
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Read More
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Read More
Read More
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Read More
Read More
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Read More
Read More
Coindesk |Nathan DiCamillo | Nov 18, 2019 The Takeaway The research arm of payment card giant Visa has published a paper describing the development of LucidiTEE, a blockchain system for orchestrating sensitive data among multiple parties. For example, the paper outlines a system that would allow banks and fintech applications to share data without relying on intermediary data aggregators. While Europe has relied on legislation like GDPR to set standards for securely sharing customer data, US banks had to develop agreements with data aggregators. Visa, the world’s largest card payment network, has been quietly developing a blockchain system that could upend how banks transfer customer transaction data to consumer financial applications like Mint and Credit Karma. In a paper published by Visa’s research and development arm, researchers describe a system called LucidiTEE. It outlines a system for sharing sensitive personal data on a blockchain, crunching that data within a trusted execution environment (TEE) and using history-based policies to ensure that each of the parties receive an output of the computation. (The system’s name is a combination of TEE and the word lucidity). See: Visa Makes Its Second Investment Into a Crypto Startup The first application of LucidiTEE is sharing data ...
Read More
Read More
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Read More
Read More
Green Biz | Joel Makower | Nov 18, 2019 "Smart beta." It’s a term of art on Wall Street, a blend of active and passive investing strategies that typically combine an underlying stock index with an investment manager’s savvy about a potential stock’s liquidity, volatility, momentum and other factors. The strategy is said to provide a risk/return profile that is more attractive than a singularly active or passive investment product. That nerdy financial term will be among those increasingly relevant to corporate sustainability execs — CSOs, for short — as the astonishing rise of environmental, social and governance, or ESG, factors takes hold in the mainstream investing world. ESG assets under management have grown the fastest among smart beta strategies — a compound annual growth rate of more than 70 percent over the past five years, according to a recent report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "The opportunity is also too big to ignore," the report's authors wrote. "Bank of America estimates that over the next few decades, equity investments aligned with ESG criteria could attract assets equal to the size of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index today." The S&P 500 in October had a market capitalization of ...
Read More
Read More
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