A propos of nothing it looks like the proprietor of the Crown and Anchor is Croatian. Croatia held a referendum about acceding to the EU on 22 January 2012, and they were admitted on 1st July 2013.
I agree it helps you monitor where the money has gone, after the event.
There's plenty of research that shows that credit cards encourage extra spending. But of course, that suits the landlord just dandy.
I ran into big problems with overspending on a credit card when I was on the dole and know first hand how dangerous they can be.
Card payment doesn't have to mean credit card.
However there are plenty of brick and mortar businesses that still implement a cash-only policy. Absolutely no excuse for that either, and as objectionable (if not much more objectionable, given the reasons why a good number of them would be operating a cash-only policy in the first place) as a pub running a card-only policy.
So in your eyes, a successful and expensive pub chain that suddenly withdraws the ability to pay cash - and disenfranchises some of its poorer customers at a stroke - is every bit as bad - no worse - than a small business running a cash-only policy?
Earlier on it was being suggested that bar staff were almost always on the take, and now it's small businesses fiddling the books? Jeez. This place is turning into the Mail Online. If you want to get worked up at tax dodging, look to the corporates swindling billions rather than having a go at businesses struggling to survive.
From the stand-alone point of ‘the owner is denying a choice of payments to consumers for selfish/ greed reasons, and it amounts to a big fuck you to his customers’ (a stand-alone point that has made numerous times in this thread separate from any other considerations also being discussed), then absolutely. Refusing to accept cards is every bit as much of a ‘fuck you’ to the consumer as refusing to accept cash.
You do understand that small traders have to pay charges on top for card use, yes? And that many of them are struggling on the breadline so even relatively small costs could put them under. Yet you still you compare their situation with that of a successful, upmarket pub chain, with a turnover in the millions, and still won't criticise them for excluding their poorer customers?
The charges for card payment processing are fairly small, and processing cash also cost businesses money. A lot of cash-only businesses do very well and have traded successfully for years or decades, and unless any of us have inside information I don’t think any of us are in a position to judge which businesses are restricting payment methods accepted as an absolutely necessary cost-cutting measure to survive and which are doing it as a profit-maximising greedy scheme.
So you really are comparing a market trader with a multi million business. Nice one.
Studies have shown that people spend more with cards, and that suits the bosses fine - because people then having to deal with their overspending is not their problem.
I didn’t say a market trader. I said one of the many brick and mortar retailers that accept cash only.
I think it would be more useful for them to legislate to make sure banks make some form of account/card payment system accessible to all. That would have a greater long term benefit and would be less difficult to monitor compliance.
Make sure that businesses or banks were complying with the legislation.
Yes you did: "Either all businesses offering less than a full range of payment methods are described as having little regard for their customers, or none are."
Yes, but unregistered cards that you top up can fulfill this function. Like is possible with Oyster cards. In some cities they have an equivalent to Oyster, that you can use in shops and bars etc. You just get the card from a machine and put some credit on it. In the long term this seems the more likely solution. People exchanging bits of paper and metal will become redundant I reckon.
