Earlier today, an establishment here was refusing all customers who could only pay cash. "The system is down, we can't open the till." Cards were still ok. Now I'm wondering if businesses with electronic tills, maybe even controlled from a central-office computer, could foreshadow an eventual requirement for ATO-linked tills in all businesses that still dare to accept cash from patrons.
One of the proposals that was raised as a method of discouraging cash transactions without overtly banning it was to make handling of cash by businesses expensive, time-consuming and subject to annoying bureaucracy.
One of my old bosses: "When you put people and money together, the amount of money always gets smaller". If a business (or anyone else) wants to rip off the ATO, they will. E.g. just because you have an electronic till linked to the ATO doesn't mean you can't have a manual till not linked to the ATO sitting next to it. There are plenty of dark tills out there.
That should be: "When you put people, money, and government together, ..." In your dark-till scenario I can certainly imagine ATO enforcers making random visits to businesses in targeted industries and making a cash purchase while monitoring associated updates to some hypothetical ATO system that tracks deposits and withdrawals from the networked till, with painful punishments for those found to bypass the system. This would be designed to discourage off-system transactions through fear.
Sounds like that establishment is run by idiots. Why wouldn't they just get a box to put the money in while they got their technical glitch sorted out?
And getting more intrusive into everyone's lives. I think comparisons with the East German Stasi are more accurate.
Maybe they were using some sort of integrated networked system that restricted access if things were not working? I just did a quick Google and the first result describes one offering:
If handling of cash becomes linked to complex systems and communications networks then one of the important benefits of physical cash is lost -- it is no longer robust against failure.
Exact opposite happened to me yesterday at a parking station. Had to pay $22, I always use a card for legitimate deductions, only to find the machine rejected two cards, so I had to pay with notes.
Only for debts. If you owed Woolworths money for a debt, then they must take cash. But if you are just buying something from them, they get to chose what they want to take, you have no say in it.
This would happen 100 times for every 1 time that won't accept cash because the till is down for whatever reason.
That's entirely up to the accounting system and procedure used by the company. Having a law that forced such things would not go down well at all.
Until "improvements" in till technology result in them being prone to similar failures. It would destroy a major benefit of cash. Cash is simple and robust, or should be.
