Cash-only restaurants
 

If you know the restaurants offering the best value food around your region takes only cash, and you need credit card spending in order to get sign up bonus, what would you do? Choose a restaurant accepting credit card but offering crap food, or forgo the bonus?

Typically cash-only restaurants are inexpensive. They're street vendors, quick lunch lines, etc. I try not to commit to spending targets so aggressive that I need to find ways to charge even small purchases or make purchases I normally would not make.

I think Peter Lugar's only accepts cash or their own credit card.

I've run into a few places that only take cash and they could be expensive or inexpensive.

Why would you spend money (either cash or by cc) on a crap product? I'd pay cash for the good food and find another way to use my cc to get the bonus.

I go to the restaurants I like. I don't care if they only accepts cash, cards, cheques, silver, gold or goats. I'll bring the right currency/method of payment with me.

IME, most restaurants not accepting a very common type of payment usually have a warning on their website or send one out when you make a reservation.

You will miss fantastic places (both hotels and restaurants) if you stick to credit card usage.

I haven't seen any high end restaurants that only accepted cash. There are a few inexpensive places here that are like that. I've eaten there. The food was good.

If I was hypothetically on the last day of a CC promo and 1 meal short of reaching a spend bonus, I would look for an alternative to spending $10-15 on "crap" food. If I couldn't find one, I'd buy the "crap" food. I probably wouldn't eat it though.

These days with Square virtually everywhere, I come across fewer and fewer cash only businesses.

have the good dinner and pay cash. Spend somewhere else.

:confused:

I feel that the places that have minimums and/or charge extra are a bigger problem now. Granted, they're still not that common yet but I run into them on occasion. When I do, though, I pay cash and tend not to go back (unless, of course, the food makes it worth the hassle).

I don't and don't plan to churn credit cards, so cash is NBD.

This.

If you're having to spend money you wouldn't otherwise have spent, it's worth a careful cost-benefit analysis to ask yourself if you're actually spending more than the bonus is worth...to take it one step further, as an example: Let's say I get 50k mile airline bonus, which maybe is worth $500. Let's say I make $475 non-normal purchases trying to get the bonus. So it's only worth $25...but I ALSO could have just bought the airline ticket and got points on another card.

Use any numbers that work, I was just using simple numbers vs. actual to illustrate.

As far as cash-only restaurants, fine with me, but it gets annoying at a high end place, just because you never know how much cash you'll need if you're enjoying yourself, and it kind of stalls the evening to have to run to an ATM.

If you are in small cities, most of the restaurants will accept cash.

Almost every restaurant will accept cash. That's not the problem...

This is an area where you can't generalize. There are cities where hot dog carts take CC's because nobody carries cash and they can't sell without the capability. There are also cities where many high-end restaurants don't take CC's, either because they don't want to deal with the cost of interchange fees and CC disputes.

Unless you are on business travel and have no option but to eat at a restauarant, it is usually a discretionary expense and twisting your life into a pretzel to score a few points in some program is likely a poor monetary and even poorer personal choice.

I eat where I want to eat and use the payment form that suits me best if it's available. But, I can't imagine passing on my restaurant of choice even if I had to use an ATM and pay a fee.

Wait, Peter Luger's has their own branded CC? :eek:

Yes, they do, unless I'm misinformed.

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.

Keep out theft and robbery. With credit card transactions the owners will be less worried about the cashiers or managers pocketing some of the money. Also with bartenders too. And when you have no money at the site, no one will try to rob you. It also makes IRS audit easier when you don't have cash income.

Maybe a true guy with a push card, but if you extend "street vendor" to food truck, they all have the card swipe cubes on their cell phones.

That is the small family restaurant owner's dilemma: getting rob by robbers or the local government.

I'm talking globally. Yes, newly hip food trucks in US cities take credit cards; it's part of their calculated appeal to the 21st century young, urban, professional market. But traditional street vendors in many other parts of the world are routinely cash-only.

Same.

One night's dinner won't surely be a massive spend to put towards your cc bonus?

I haven’t been to Peter Luger for a few years but I’ve been going there on and off since the mid-90s and it was always cash or their own credit card. It isn’t like a Peter Luger branded Visa or Master Card credit card from what I can tell (I always just paid cash) but rather a store card like Department stores used to have before MC and Visa took over.

It is very hard to view a semi-decent restaurant that is "cash only" as anything other than a tax-dodge. Surely such businesses will attract more than their share of thorough audits from the Revenue?

Interestingly; many of the more trendy craft beer bars in Scandinavia (where I spend more time than is good for me!) are now "cards only" and refuse to handle cash at all.

This is definitely the beginning of an unfortunate trend. I'm starting to see it occasionally, but more often in hotels, airports, etc. than restaurants.

That's funny. You appear to be on a forum where people fly. Presumably you have recently been on a plane? Possibly operated by a US carrier where you can pay money for little food items? Ever notice what they take, or do not take, as means of payment?

It isn't a credit card, per se. Just their own card. But they have the ability to give you credit, as in the T&C it says they charge 1.5% per month for unpaid bills.