This little skit may seem funny in a "back in my day..." way, but the way we pay for things today is altogether weird. I got used to paying for everything with a credit card because of the points, but then stores won the right to add a surcharge for their expenses, so I try to have some cash on me lately for small purchases. Most of my regular bills go to a credit card automatically, and I pay that once a month with a phone transfer from the bank. I use PayPal for mail order. My kids use debit cards and Venmo.
I still write checks for bills where the drive-through window is close by, and for taxes. But stores either won't take checks at all, or they don't need you to fill them out because they just run the check through a machine and get the money transferred. It never occurred to me that a store would give up on checks because the cashiers can't read cursive. But I'm not surprised that young people don't write checks. The banks won't let you open a checking account until you're 18, and by then it's a bit late to get your parents to show you how to do it. (via Nag on the Lake)
Friday, April 14, 2023
Credit Surcharge
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4 comments:
I remember being amazed on a trip to the US in 2000 when the person in front of me in the supermarket queue paid with a cheque. Stores refused to take them here long before that, for various reasons including how long it took banks to clear the funds, the amount of fraud, and the inconvenience (for the store).
My G&E company recently forced me onto paperless billing, and then wants to charge me $3.50 to pay by credit card online. So each month I mail them a check. Just like in the video here, because F those guys.
One of my employers pays me with a check that the bookkeeper prints. The other pays me with Zelle. My 94-year-old mother refuses to carry any kind of card but I.D. and pays at the grocery store with a check. My landlord still wants a check or cash.
The only trouble I ever had with a check was in the 1980s when I didn't have a bank account. I got used to just going to the bank a paycheck was written on and cashing it, then one day they wouldn't do that anymore until had a cow at the teller and a woman I knew from local theater shows came out of the back and told her to just cash it.
Oh, and one time in the early 1990s the woman who bought a newspaper I worked for failed and for some reason gave me a blank check on her personal account (!). When I tried to cash it for the full amount she owed me, there were insufficient funds. I got the bank phone number to call to find out if there were funds yet, and played a little game for a few weeks, of asking if /half/ the amount would cash, or /three-quarters/ the amount. The amount available went up and down, and then one day they said the full amount would work, so I drove to the bank and cashed it.
I used to re-order checks when I got to the warning page on the last tablet of checks. This time, it's been sitting there a while because I know I still have plenty of checks for my needs. It has a coupon code for 25% off, offer expires May of 2020.
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