Was there a major business who could only accept cash a few months ago?

January 28, 2023 1:40 PM

Have you experienced or heard about one of the major fast food restaurants not being able to accept cards for that day, or so? If so, is it a one off thing, so need to make sure to have cash at all times, or could it happen again, and maybe even at more than one place? What is the conclusion that different people would come to as a result of that experience? P.S Is there a better category this question should be in? I guess it would be too late to edit after a day or so.
posted by amfgf to Computers & Internet (24 answers total)

Best answer: The headline doesn't match the body.

"only accept cash" vs "not being able to accept cash"

Which of these are you asking about?
posted by Marky at 1:52 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: My local McDonalds was only accepting cash one night about a month ago—but I don’t know if it was just that location or more widespread. I assumed it was an issue with their card readers or something similar but I didn’t ask.
posted by bookmammal at 1:55 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The entire north half of my province lost internet last year for most of a day (ie:the nearest working bank machine was a ten hour drive away). Which meant all businesses were cash only including the dentist where my boss went for an emergency root canal and the pharmacy for pain meds and anti biotics. Reaffirmed my belief to always have some cash at hand even if it isn't root canal money.
posted by Mitheral at 1:56 PM on January 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: OMG Thanks Marky, How do I edit it? I meant not being able to aceept cards. It's the title question that' correct.
posted by amfgf at 1:56 PM on January 28, 2023

Mod note: edited the title, carry on
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:03 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Are you remembering the Canadian Rogers outage?
posted by sagc at 2:32 PM on January 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: This question sounded familiar, and it's similar to an earlier deleted post of yours about not being able to pay with cash, only this time it's about a restaurant not taking credit cards for some reason for one day. I can't tell if you're looking for more information about something you heard about, or if there's a specific event you're trying to chat about.

To answer your question, of course something like that could happen again. Computers go down, phone line go down, etc., all the time, meaning there's no way for a store to send your credit card info and process that transaction.
posted by emelenjr at 2:51 PM on January 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Whenever there is an Internet or power outage, cards will not be accepted. I like to carry $100 or so when traveling, for that reason.
posted by NotLost at 2:59 PM on January 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Costco had a debit/credit outage in December just before Christmas. Reddit post about it here. Some people in the comments say they were not the only retail store with the issue.
posted by soelo at 3:30 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Major businesses can revert to cash-only temporarily due to

a) power/electricity being down

b) phone line/internet being down

c) software/IT issues - less common, but this happened Australia wide to a major Australian supermarket a few months ago.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:16 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My local feed store was recently unable to process credit transactions. There had been a fraud issue with several transactions, so the processor put the store on hold for a few days while the issue was sorted out.
posted by SPrintF at 4:18 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I was at Ikea during the Canadian Rogers outage and had to pay cash for a $700 mattress.
posted by dobbs at 4:44 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It’s always possible any particular place could be unable to accept cash because their hardware or software is having problems. I feel like I run into it a couple of times a year at various places. I don’t draw any particular conclusion from that but I do usually have a little emergency cash in my wallet for any situation that might call for it.

For your meta-question, I can imagine putting this question in this category, or work/money, or technology - really depends what aspect of this you’re looking to talk about, which seems unclear. At any rate I don’t think you can change the category once posted, so don’t worry about it, what you picked seems fine.
posted by Stacey at 5:00 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: A couple of months ago a business or several businesses in Boston or New York Ciry announced they stop accepting cash and would only allow payment pay credit or debit card. The move was denounced as classist and discriminatory, and the local authorities made clear that such a policy would be illegal. They started accepting cash again.

I realize this may be the opposite of what you asked, but it was newsworthy and so maybe it’s what you were thinking of. Sorry I don’t recall the businesses involved.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:22 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: adding to chariot pulled by cassowaries' comment:

> software/IT issues - less common, but this happened Australia wide to a major Australian supermarket a few months ago.

Merchants purchase a service that lets them process customer payments by credit card or electronic transfers or so on. Here in Australia, merchants often use a service offered by one of our major banks.

If one of the big banks experiences some major IT / software issue that disrupts its ability to process payments for its merchant customers, this might stop a very large number of merchants from being able to process electronic payments for some time, until staff at the bank are able to restore service. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does it pisses a lot of people off and tends to make the national news.

There can be similar failure modes when large employers use a bank to process their payroll. If something goes wrong with the bank's IT systems, this might cause tens of thousands of employees not to get paid on time. Again, doesn't happen very often, but when it does it pisses a lot of people off and might make the news.

> could it happen again

Oh yes.

> maybe even at more than one place?

Oh yes. Which places get impacted depend on the cause of the failure. Electricity failure might impact one group of businesses in one area that are fed from the same bit of electrical distribution network. Internet failure might impact only a group of businesses that share the same ISP, or many businesses in a large area, if someone managed to dig through a key fiber optic cable that was a single point of failure. Payment processing failure at a payment processing service provider may prevent all merchants that depend on that service from processing payments.

> What is the conclusion that different people would come to as a result of that experience?

Services work most of the time, but everything has some nonzero failure rate, and it is often hugely expensive or impractical to reduce a failure rate from say 0.1% to 0.0001%. If a failure of some service you depend on would seriously ruin your day (or year), plan for the possibility of failure.
posted by are-coral-made at 6:40 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Shit happens, keep $20-$50 in your phone case.
posted by stray at 6:53 PM on January 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: My local weed dispensary lost whatever deal they had with their payment provider and has been cash-only since the middle of last month.
posted by jordemort at 7:08 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I don't know the incident you're talking about but here in Australia, I've been to 2 hospitality venues in the last 6 months that had their electronic payment facilities go down for whatever reason. I could still order and pay because I had cash, others had to go elsewhere. It wasn't great for the businesses but what were they going to do, take an IOU?

It might be annoying to carry cash (and lots of people I know don't!) but sometimes you need a way to pay that's not dependent on technology working.
posted by pianissimo at 7:15 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Interestingly I recently had reason to be at my local Safeway during a power outage due to a storm, and they had some sort of local power generation that kept their fridges and registers on and accepting cards. Total trip to have to shop the aisles with my phone flashlight and then just...walk up front and pay with my Amex like usual. The self checkout kiosks were even working!
posted by potrzebie at 11:27 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: In northern Ohio last summer, the major credit card processing provider went down. *Nobody* (restaurant, grocer, gas station) was accepting cards. It happens -- this outage happened to be due to a computer failure, but sometimes power goes out/connections go down because somebody hit a pole or dug up a cable. Fortunately, I had cash in my wallet so I could buy gas. This is why I had cash in my wallet, because I know that nothing is failure-proof. Cash almost always works -- unless the register is down.

Last fall I had to pay cash at the parking deck, because their new wi-fi reliant e-payment system was swamped by all the people coming in for the show. (That, I found out later, was partly because the repeater across the street died.)
posted by jlkr at 6:08 AM on January 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: One time my son was taking the Amtrak from NYC to Boston and the food car couldn't take credit cards that day and he had no cash, so he couldn't eat!
posted by wisekaren at 6:14 AM on January 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Wow so many incidents!! It looks like It happens often enough.

Thank you all.
posted by amfgf at 1:30 PM on January 29, 2023

Response by poster: Is it better to wait a week or more before posting something like what I posted just above? I feel like if I didn't post that, there would have been more posts.
posted by amfgf at 1:04 PM on February 2, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks all again.

wisekaren's post prompted me to ask another question:
https://ask.metafilter.com/370444/what-are-the-medications-that-have-to-be-taken-on-an-empty-stomach
I wondered if he also needed to take medication, and if it needed to be taken with food or an empty stomach.
posted by amfgf at 12:23 PM on March 1, 2023