The newest restaurants in our Los Angeles neighborhood are not accepting cash. Credit cards only!

I messaged a friend who's a regular there, and he explained it to me as just a program where trusted regulars can put it on on their account/'card', and they just settle it end of month.
So I guess it kind of is a credit card, but kind of isn't :D

That's a strange business decision.

I wonder if that's even legal, and if it's ever been challenged. It's hard to believe you can sell goods or services in the US and discriminate against someone who wants to use US money.

ul. 12, 2017-- Today Visa (NYSE:V) announced it is launching a major effort to encourage businesses to go cashless. Aiming to create a culture where cash is no longer king, the program will give merchants increased ability to accept all forms of global digital payments. Visa will be encouraging and helping merchants go cashless by using innovation to their advantage in order to stay competitively connected to their customers.

To encourage businesses to go cashless, Visa is announcing The Visa Cashless Challenge, with a call to action for small business restaurants, cafés or food truck owners to describe what cashless means for them, their employees and customers. Visa will be awarding up to $500,000 to 50 eligible US-based small business food service owners who commit to joining the 100% cashless quest.

Uncommon, but not totally strange. A pizza restaurant near me has a "credit/debit preferred" policy. They don't refuse cash but they do discourage it. Their reasoning is that it simplifies transactions, reduces the burden of managing cash, and reduces risk of theft.

The common explanation parses the phrase, "valid tender for all debts public or private" with emphasis on debt. If you've already obtained a good or service and are paying for it after the fact, you are paying a debt. If you're paying before receipt of goods there is no debt and thus the business can legally refuse to accept cash.

Wonder if this is really just a way to keep out riffraff more than anything else?

Not a great way - I know lots of riffraff with credit cards :p

That's interesting. So it kind of falls under the category of a business being able to deny anyone service for any reason, as long as it's not discriminatory based on things like race, gender, religion, etc.? Since anyone/everyone has access to cash, it wouldn't be discriminatory to not accept it.

Credit card companies better start a push to issue credit cards to children too, if this becomes a trend.

I'm sure credit card companies would love that! I would assume most cashless places will also take debit cards, which many children already have.

Most everywhere takes both by virtue of debit cards (at least in the US) having a Visa or Mastercard logo. While it is possible to get a debit card without either, those seem very uncommon in my experience.

Most all of the "cash only" businesses here have on-site ATMs. I think some of them get action on the fees the machines charge.

Yeah, the Visa debit cards are much less common here in Canada, although we are starting to see them a bit more in the last couple of years (I've never even seen Mastercard debit cards). Still, I've never seen anyplace that takes credit and doesn't also take debit.

Meanwhile, stores that actually accept the debit cards without the logos are nowhere near as common here. I suspect that without the logos, a lot fewer people would be using cards in general and acceptance of cards in general by merchants would be lower.

They also take a debit card.

We're seeing fewer cash-only places in Western Europe since the EU capped interchange fees at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for European consumer credit cards--in a busy counter-serve place, the time savings is more than the interchange fee.

I can't speak for other countries, but in Belgium it's still common for discount shops and small restaurants to take only the local debit cards, whose fees are capped by the network at 5c per transaction, because by accepting Visa/MC you also get to pay the higher interchange fees on business cards or cards issued outside the EU, and there are plenty of both in the wallets of Brussels.

...incidentally, this is why the credit card miles game is virtually nonexistent in Europe now.