News Disney to pilot electronic-only transactions at its resort hotels

[Goofnut1980]

I remember hearing from my great uncle that worked at the World when it first opened for many years - in maintenance, that cash used to be just put in bags and weighed. That is the total they would use until the bank told them the correct amount.

Can you imagine having so much cash that you can just weigh the bags and hope for the best!

I travel a lot for work, credit is so much easier to not have to worry about getting cash from countries that I will never use. So I only use cards where ever we go. So much easier!

 

[alphac2005]

When you're selling $7 t-shirts for $29.99, what's a 3% transaction charge? (Rhetorical -- nobody has to actually do the math here...)

No, but a $3 candy at 3% & .30 transaction fee per transaction on low margin items make those even lower margins. That's the point. It's just like going to any place dining place and people charge a soda, a small item, you name it, and it drives margins down the drain while not increasing the average ticket sale.

 

[jaklgreen]

I hear what you are saying but now that my daughter is older, I am in the process of teaching her to be more independant. She is very introverted and doesn't like to order for herself in resturants or talk to people in general. If she wants to purchase something she needs to go up to the cashier with her money, talk to the cashier and purchase the item. I am not always going to be there to talk for her and I take every opportunity to teach these lessons including on vacation. I am also trying to teach her the value of a dollar, earning your own money and spending it wisely. Having me pay for things and paying me back isn't teaching her in the same way in my opinion.

I hear you. My oldest is like that. It is a fine line between encouraging and pushing.

 

[jaklgreen]

It is why in large... especially in tourist areas. Large bills represent large liability. It's normal for fraudsters to launder their fake bills with normal small transactions to get fresh, legit tender. There is zero recourse or recovery for a vendor who takes a fake bill. They have to eat it.

Change is easily planned for - just increase your til size or have supervisors available to restock.

I envy your job where a person can just make decisions on company policy. Unfortunately even reasonable suggestions fall on deaf ears at most places. The higher ups have already decided what they want to do and have no interest in making a "simple" change. I wonder about you sometimes. Where do you work that you have the benefit of being able to make all of these right simple decisions? Besides according the the government, $20 bills are the ones mostly counterfeit.

 

[flynnibus]

I envy your job where a person can just make decisions on company policy. Unfortunately even reasonable suggestions fall on deaf ears at most places

Not sure what that's about... 'change' in that context means money in your til. It's a problem every cash til has to manage, so this is not rocket science. Every business has a means to make more change... else you send business away. I've worked grocery stories, retail, food service (tourist areas and traditional) and it's just a fact of life everyone has a system for. First ask if the customer can pay with a lower bill, exchange with another cashier, or ping the manager for more cash. The problem generally is they don't want too much cash in the til at any time, so they are constantly siphoning cash out.. but in the same regard, managers could put more in.

I wonder about you sometimes. Where do you work that you have the benefit of being able to make all of these right simple decisions? Besides according the the government, $20 bills are the ones mostly counterfeit.

$20 are more common - but you take less of a hit on making $10 in change vs $90 in change. Plus, that $20 in your til has a good chance of flowing back out... where the $100 bill won't. Not that passing counterfit is sound practice - but that is reality.. who has their hand on the money when the music stops is the one who gets burned.

And to your other comment... it's not hard. If you are surrounded by stupid - leave. If your company is doing it all wrong, find the company that is doing it better and fight to join them. Mediocrity is fueled by apathy.

 

[AEfx]

Thankfully you are completely protected using your debit card, thanks to Regulation E. Bank of America doesn't want you to use it because they have to eat the cost in many cases.

That's not exactly true. Debit cards have certain protections, but actual credit cards have more. It is also a longer process to get a cleaned out checking account restored than to get a charge removed.

 

[jaklgreen]

Not sure what that's about... 'change' in that context means money in your til. It's a problem every cash til has to manage, so this is not rocket science. Every business has a means to make more change... else you send business away. I've worked grocery stories, retail, food service (tourist areas and traditional) and it's just a fact of life everyone has a system for. First ask if the customer can pay with a lower bill, exchange with another cashier, or ping the manager for more cash. The problem generally is they don't want too much cash in the til at any time, so they are constantly siphoning cash out.. but in the same regard, managers could put more in.



$20 are more common - but you take less of a hit on making $10 in change vs $90 in change. Plus, that $20 in your til has a good chance of flowing back out... where the $100 bill won't. Not that passing counterfit is sound practice - but that is reality.. who has their hand on the money when the music stops is the one who gets burned.

And to your other comment... it's not hard. If you are surrounded by stupid - leave. If your company is doing it all wrong, find the company that is doing it better and fight to join them. Mediocrity is fueled by apathy.

The thing is, I don't really care. My point was that someone posted that the reason places do not take bigger bills is because of counterfeits. That is not the case, as I posted. I wasn't stating that fact for a solution. So we tell a few people sorry, don't have that change. 99% of people have other forms of payment so it really is not something that needs to be changed or fixed. We got off the reason for the post, back to our regularly scheduled program.

 

[Dutch Inn '76]

I don't like this at all. I am a cash user on vacation... Not a fan!

YES YES YES.

...and the more I think about this the more it irritates me. If I was standing at a Disney register with merchandise and cash in my hand, and the clerk told me that they didn't accept cash, there are even odds that I would give them an odd look, set the merchandise down, and walk out. I am not going to reward a vendor that will not accept my cash.

 

[flynnibus]

That would be hot potato and you dump the hundred off on the wait staff or a vendor. There really isn't that much funny money floating around the US. I handled thousands a night and have only seen a couple of suspect bills, no idea if they were fake I just passed them along to someone other then a bank.

Location plays a big role. Fraudsters also like to target areas with lots of temp/inexperienced workers and run scams like keep asking for change in different formats to get them to hand over more money than they are supposed to, etc. Using crowded areas to help blend in was also a big deal... high volume = harder to recall people. But cameras everywhere now probably diffuse some of that.

 

[lazyboy97o]

That would be hot potato and you dump the hundred off on the wait staff or a vendor. There really isn't that much funny money floating around the US. I handled thousands a night and have only seen a couple of suspect bills, no idea if they were fake I just passed them along to someone other then a bank.

Wow. That’s quite scummy.

 

[Jon81uk]

I hear what you are saying but now that my daughter is older, I am in the process of teaching her to be more independant. She is very introverted and doesn't like to order for herself in resturants or talk to people in general. If she wants to purchase something she needs to go up to the cashier with her money, talk to the cashier and purchase the item. I am not always going to be there to talk for her and I take every opportunity to teach these lessons including on vacation. I am also trying to teach her the value of a dollar, earning your own money and spending it wisely. Having me pay for things and paying me back isn't teaching her in the same way in my opinion.

I get your point, but also I think kids are more likely to be paying for items in gift shops and fast food. Chance of a teenager settling a Boma bill on their own is low.
Although the WDWMagic article says everything at Jambo House will go cashless I expect the gift shop and The Mara food court are going to be the two places with the most issues, including the one you raise of kids paying without parents around. Boma and Jiko shouldn’t be as much of an issue.

 

[Jon81uk]

Also is credit card fraud a much different issue in the USA? In the UK we’ve had chip and pin for 12+ years and signatures are very very rarely used to verify card use. This seemed to have cut the risk down significantly especially of card skimming as it now never leaves your sight as the customer needs to enter the PIN. We’ve also had contactless payment for 8+ years, although only really really widely accepted for 4-5yrs.

Banking in the USA seems to be incredibly different to UK/Europe.
There is of course also the thing in US of choosing credit or debit. For us you have a separate physical card for debit and a different one for a credit account (approved and managed separately).

 

[J_Krafty24]

In the US the banks are fighting going to a pin system because the way the fees are set up they make more money on signature charges than with pin charges. Until fraud starts costing the banks enough that they are losing more money to fraud than they make based on pushing signature transactions they will not change their systems. The signatures are a joke and mean nothing. Cashiers never even see the card to tell what the name is supposed to be let alone what the signature is supposed to look like.

 

[FullSailDan]

Also is credit card fraud a much different issue in the USA? In the UK we’ve had chip and pin for 12+ years and signatures are very very rarely used to verify card use. This seemed to have cut the risk down significantly especially of card skimming as it now never leaves your sight as the customer needs to enter the PIN. We’ve also had contactless payment for 8+ years, although only really really widely accepted for 4-5yrs.

Banking in the USA seems to be incredibly different to UK/Europe.
There is of course also the thing in US of choosing credit or debit. For us you have a separate physical card for debit and a different one for a credit account (approved and managed separately).

It is really bad here. Chip transactions have brought it down slightly, but we still see online usage of credit cards. A number of retail outlets have either refused to pay for the upgrade to machines that support chip/pin or they haven't enabled the chip portion.

We actually have separate cards for credit and debit too. The reason they asked you "credit or debit?" is because when debit cards originally rolled out in the US, they were typically managed by a separate authorization network and as such you had to connect to it rather than the normal Visa/Mastercard/etc authorization system. The credit card companies essentially allowed the debit card network to do authorizations over the credit card network, but for a fee. If the merchant had a direct connect to the debit network, debit transactions were/are cheaper for the merchant, in the magnitude of several dollars sometimes. So if the merchant can run it as debit, they will! Now a days most machines know what it is from the start, and the major credit card companies have lowered their fees to try and match. Even further, where the debit networks used to negotiate the relationship with major CC services, those major CC guys are issuing the debit cards directly with the bank, cutting out the middle man.

I learned way more about payment systems when I started doing PCI audits a few years back.

 

[JIMINYCR]

*Travelers* checks..... unless something has changed in the past few months, yes. And unless something has changed in the past few months, they are free at AAA in the U.S.

Our AAA has discontinued the Travelers Checks long ago. They were replaced with a prepaid travel Visa card.

 

[lazyboy97o]

We’ve also had contactless payment for 8+ years, although only really really widely accepted for 4-5yrs.

Contactless is very slowly growing but we also have major retailers (Walmart, Target, CVS, Home Depot) who are actively hostile towards contactless payments, to the point that they have the hardware and go through the extra effort to disable contactless payment.

 

[flynnibus]

Also is credit card fraud a much different issue in the USA? In the UK we’ve had chip and pin for 12+ years and signatures are very very rarely used to verify card use. This seemed to have cut the risk down significantly especially of card skimming as it now never leaves your sight as the customer needs to enter the PIN. We’ve also had contactless payment for 8+ years, although only really really widely accepted for 4-5yrs.

Banking in the USA seems to be incredibly different to UK/Europe.
There is of course also the thing in US of choosing credit or debit. For us you have a separate physical card for debit and a different one for a credit account (approved and managed separately).

US merchant banks fought the migration to CHIP+PIN for years.. arguing refresh costs. Only after a few high profile mega breaches like the Target one did the Credit Card companies get off the pot and set a deadline for making CHIP authentication the preferred method. The problem was, they didn't go CHIP+PIN, but instead still stuck with CHIP+SIGN as the default.

They forced vendors to move to CHIP for POS buying by changing the liability positions for CHIP vs swipe for the merchant. Nearly all cards are CHIP here now, but mainly all CHIP+SIGN. CHIP at vendors is probably somewhere around 50-60% chip now.. and growing steadily.

Credit vs Debit is handled differently in who provides the services and backend. Debit is cheaper for the merchant, but more expensive for the customer (usually has a per purchase fee). Credit has far greater fraud protections and less risk of money being held in limbo vs Debit card fraud. Hence, customers are encouraged to always use Credit when they can.

Debit should only be used by those who can't get credit... but many people still insist on using it as a budget tool for themselves.

 

[StarGirl]

I have no problem with this and I'm from the UK. We have 2 credit cards with no fee foreign transactions and the exchange rate is always better than when buying cash.

 

[spock8113]

It's the wave of the future, which, by the way is here now without the use of a Flux Capacitor.
Apparently, Amazon has a cash-free use-your-phone-self-checkout supermarket.
I also saw on the news, virtual doctor visits thru your phone and they can prescribe Tamiflu by this examination process.

I hate the idea of virtual Dr. visits but paying electronically at the resorts is pretty much what I do already.

 

[lazyboy97o]

It's the wave of the future, which, by the way is here now without the use of a Flux Capacitor.
Apparently, Amazon has a cash-free use-your-phone-self-checkout supermarket.
I also saw on the news, virtual doctor visits thru your phone and they can prescribe Tamiflu by this examination process.

I hate the idea of virtual Dr. visits but paying electronically at the resorts is pretty much what I do already.

There is no [self] check out at Amazon Go.

Telemedicine isn’t all that new.