Makes sense, but like a lot of other guys I hate carrying coins in my pocket. I'm willing to get used to it. I use my bankcard 99.9% of the time anyway.
http://news.yahoo.com/congress-looks...-politics.html
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Makes sense, but like a lot of other guys I hate carrying coins in my pocket. I'm willing to get used to it. I use my bankcard 99.9% of the time anyway.
http://news.yahoo.com/congress-looks...-politics.html
Not a bad idea. My suggestion to stimulate usage would be for the government to give a big pile of them to every lazy bastard in this country who gets by on government handouts. This way the incumbents are likely to get reelected and the costs will be covered by "the rich" and future generations
So what happens at strip clubs??:533: Here honey let me put this coin .................... :party0052: :trink39:
The article mentions the problem with it being barely distinguishable from the quarter. That's a legit problem. Make it a little bigger and a noticeably different color.
:eclipsee_Victoria:Quote:
Originally Posted by cattails
"It's really a matter of just getting used to it," said Diehl, the former Mint director.
You grow an extra pocket in my pants or give me a marsupial pouch and I might manage, but how do you get used to something that is a major hassle?
I hate this idea and hate it every time the Mint and GAO pitch it. I'm all for saving money but I'm not clear on the NPV of it. They look at total savings over 30 years but the initial investment is higher and a proper investment analysis for this is the Net Present Value not total savings. You have to discount the cash stream back against the initial investment cost.
It still may be positive, a whole lot less positive than the number they use but positive but I still HATE the idea. I don't carry coins whenever possible. Jingle around in your pocket, hard to manage, hate it. When I go through the drive through I can pull out my wallet and I'm good. with the coin I have to reach into my pocket and pull out a hand full and then put back what I don't need or keep a bunch in my car somewhere.
Now I use my credit card a lot instead of cash, but I of course always carry cash. I'd try to avoid carrying $1 coins like the plague. I guess I'd save them up and take them to a bank and get real money periodically.
It won't happen of course. It may save some money but the people have NEVER liked it. It's been tried since the 70s and never works. They'd have to just take dollars out of circulation by force and politicians wont' support something that unpopular.
I don't carry coins; never have. Carry too much crap with me to add to it with coinage. They get dumped....somewhere. This will be a near disaster for me!
I don't carry much cash either, usually anyway though. I have even become used to charging something under $5 (or a debit card). I used to abhor the thought of that; not really sure why, but it always bothered me, and I would chuckle to see my daughter use her card for a $2 purchase. Now I am that person. I for sure won't be doing it with coins.
Get rid of the penny while they're making changes
I hate the coin idea, I do carry cash and pay with it often.
And Darrell, you are costing retailers a lot of money when you do that for small amounts. At our store we will not take a debit card and ring ti as a debit for anything under $25, we will ring it as a credit card. That is our break even point versus the fee on credit cards. We pay on average 90 cents per debit transaction, so we cannot swipe a debit as a debit with that fee hanging over us. And retailers just build it all back into the price somehow if possible. Our little store pays over $13,000 a year now in fees, 77% of our business is on cards. When we started 19 years ago 30% were on cards. We rarely get checks any longer even though people have them. That is money right off the top of our profits, and it is hard to raise prices because of internet sales and discounters. This is why some small retailers will not take debit cards on small amounts, some do not have machines that can take a debit card and ring as a credit card.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Darrell KSR
Make them so vending machines and humans will instantly recognize from a quarter right away and I am all for it
Jazy, I always hand the card to the retailer (if it's not a pure credit card), and when they ask "debit or credit," I tell them whichever they prefer. Doesn't matter to me, so I'd rather them make the call. I have no idea whether debit or credit is more expensive for them.
Heck, even with the Square account I have (I have had a grand total of 3 credit card transactions in my business), it's 2.75% per transaction per credit card. So on a $3 charge, it would cost $0.08. I'm pretty darn sure that's what McDonald's and the other retailers are doing since I don't punch in a PIN number.
I'm guessing (hoping) that you're under 2% on your credit card for what they charge you. I've had experience with clients bouncing checks, and considering lots of folks will buy when they just have to pull out that plastic as opposed to writing a check or paying it cash, I think it's worth it. Then again, I don't have to pay $13k in fees a year as a retail establishment either!
I use the card for small purchases at the larger chains b/c they have negotiated better merchant rates, but I don't use it for small things at small stores if I can.
They're a double edged sword for merchants. People will spend more and more often using cards but the merchants take a hefty bite out of your margins for it.
I've been pushing for us to start offering a cash discount at our auctions. it's not uncommon at all in the industry b/c card fees can be a pretty big part of the total margin. If we charge 10% on a large item sale like a used car for say $5K, we're instantly losing 30% of our gross with a card purchase, and yes we've had people use cards to buy much bigger items than that.
We have to take them and there is no doubt a willingness to spend a bit more b/c you can put it on a card for both convenience and of course being able to use credit, so I don't begrudge the 3%, but it's not cheap to do it.
I'm with Darrell. Such a move would be a disaster for me. That's why it won't pass. I'm willing to give women the vote and put up with the toilet seat thing (seriously you don't look where you're sitting before you sit down?) but don't tell me I have to carry more stuff in my pockets.
I have 4 pockets: phone, keys, wallet, carry weapon. You'll notice "change" isn't on that list.
I'm .3 over interchange, so a hair under 2% plus the trans fee. What gets you on small purchases is the per trans fee. Visa/MC base is $0.10. I see it between .12 and .15. On that $3 charge the effective rate is 5-6%. If you make 25% margin you're down to 20% and lost 1/5th of your gross to the fees.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darrell KSR
I'm basically agreeing with you, but on small purchases it's that trans fee that gets you.
It's worth taking them for sure, and it beats cold checks, but it does add up.
Do they always have a transaction fee?
That very high rate (for you guys) that I pay on a swiped card of 2.75% does not charge a transaction fee. I literally charged $1 on it, and received $0.97 in my account (it was a test). Obviously, it's not worth the tradeoff for you guys to pay another percentage point, but was wondering if they waive the fee.
If I don't swipe the card, but key it in, they charge me a $0.15 transaction fee for it. None of my charges are small, so it doesn't impact me, but if you're charging $0.15--or $0.10--on a $1 charge, that's ridiculous.
Is that debit or credit?
The base visa interchange on Retail is 1.65% + .1 and I don't see anywhere in their chart that it disappears for anything but commercial/government accounts.
http://usa.visa.com/download/merchan...ate_Sheets.pdf
Darrell I happen to know you already know what I'm about to post but for benefit of the discussion I thought I'd lay it out for folks unfamiliar with the system:
I have been a merchant rep for 3 different companies over the years, we used to sell accounts as part of our auction software stuff, and I've seen resellers sometimes eat the fee to get an account but they make it up somewhere else of course. Visa is still charging the fee and no reseller gets a discount from Visa.
It's a giant messy pyramid how this stuff is sold. At the top are Visa/MC. Next down are the back end processors. Next down are the direct vendors, primarily Global Payments and FirstData. Even most of the banks go through them. I've been a rep for both. Then there is a wide array of resellers who pay interchange plus the Global/first data fees. You can also set up with them directly.
Regardless everyone pays the piper, but some vendors will eat a loss in one place to create an angle for their pitch. They may eat the .10 trans fee or they'll do something even more sneaky:
that link shows what most don't know, Visa has a wide array of rates depending on your merchant status and which card is used. Merchants pay higher fees on rewards cards than regular cards, etc. So some vendors promise a rate even below interchange, but what they've done is quote that on a swiped base card transaction. Then they boost the rates well over interchange for a mid-qualified transaction. I've seen them boost stuff like mid-qualified to well over 3%. Of course you can add all kinds of monthly "processing fees".
People don't catch it, they don't sit down and run their realized percentages.
Darrell not saying that's the case with yours, some do eat the fees here and there and their net margin is still very fair. Here's how they decide that: when you apply you have a "per transaction" amount estimate. If you have relatively large transactions and not many of them there's little income in the trans fees for them anyway so they may waive that fee as part of the sales package. They can add 0.005% to the base rate here or there and more than make that back.
In your business I'm sure it's very few overall transactions with large average amounts (> $50). If I were selling you I'd toss in a trans fee waiver as part of the pitch. I wouldn't make a nickel a month on it as the sales rep. We'd make more money adding a fewof bucks somewhere in the monthly fees and paying the visa trans fee out of our margin.
If it were reversed I'd pitch it the other way. "We'll waive your monthly fees!" and then try to get .15 per trans.
That doesn't even touch on how it works for different cards, or the trans fees on debit versus credit. Usually you build in larger debit fees. There are more than 20 monthly fee lines on the Global Payments app and you can pick and choose which you charge and don't.
I makes used car sales look open and clear.
Meant to add, the "qualified" rates explanation. You get charged different rates for example whether you put in the street number and zip code for AVS verification or not. If you put it in and it isn't right the card will still process (if you set it to) but the rate is higher. Partial match like street wrong but zip right? That's a different rate. Swiped versus hand keyed versus online? All different. These are all different levels of "qualified transaction".
There are easily 3 or 4 dozen different rates you'll get depending on the card used and the way the transaction is processed.
For our vending machines at work, sometimes I don't have a $1 bill so I'll use a $5 and get dollar coins in change. I actually like using them in the same machines later on, but carrying them is not always great. The "presidential coins" from a few years ago are a light bronze or copper type color so they don't really look like quarters. Even with just a few transactions, I've gotten more used to them and don't mind them.
(It is also nice when I think I have a few quarters and I then realize one or two of them are actually $1,00 not $0.25. :) )
Honest truth, I have a coin-phobia. I literally hate "change". I empty my pockets daily at work and exchange it for bills. Girls up front make fun of me for doing so because its almost like an obsessive compulsive behavior. I always tell them that if you have coins in your pocket while driving and crash into a lake, you will drown. I support this with the fact that if you had 100 people who had car wrecks that ended up in the water and they drowned, they would have change in their pockets.
I'm like most of you guys I don't like change in my pocket. Back when they first started the $1 coin (some gold plating I think) I had a bunch and just put them in a safety deposit box along with other coins I have. Pay per minute pool tables used to use them, more so on the bar tables, but a great table like a Diamond table use dollar coins for all sizes.
I love dollar coins. I don't carry a lot of change around with me, but unless I'm going through a metal detector somewhere it doesn't bother me to have it in my pocket. I'd actually rather carry the dollar coin than the dollar bill on me; the bill usually looks like someone wiped something off their shoe with it.
But then like most of you guys, I usually don't have cash on me anyway.
Coinage has one advantage though. Unlike bills, they are not uniform in size so one can "feel" the difference between a penny and a quarter. I often fear I gave somebody the wrong bill. Last one I recall doing was getting a hair cut and gave her a $50 instead of a $20. When I left and went to the dry cleaner I had a $20 in my wallet rather then a $50 so I went back to the hair place for my $30 bucks back (She was expecting my since nobody gives a barber a $35.00 tip). But that is one advantage to going to coins.Quote:
Originally Posted by Catfan73
Just do away with cash all together and go to a full debit system anyway...hate carrying cash
How does that work when the power goes out or if the Russians hit us with an EMP?
I'm a little surprised that you didn't suggest doing away with cash and just making everything free.Quote:
Originally Posted by ColonelSteve
:sHa_dielaughing:Quote:
Originally Posted by CattyWampus
The power thing is a big problem. if we're hit with an EMP the currency of the Realm will be ammo and spam anyway. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by dan_bgblue
Hell that's even better...LETS DO ITQuote:
Originally Posted by CattyWampus
How many times have they tried this? I don't think it'll ever happen.
So let me get this straight...................so half of America doesn't already understand this is the way it is????????????????? :confused:Quote:
Originally Posted by CattyWampus
Yall gotta think too...you cant really get much benefits unless you have kids...why do you think Maury has become so popular, nobody knows who the father is, people are just racking in the benefits popping out illegitimate kids