Wechat is pretty good if you're in China. You can use it to do everything (payments, taxi, tickets, transfer, calls, games) versus having tons of miscellaneous poor apps. Every store and even panhandlers accept Wechat. I'm in the middle of SF and every place is still on cash only or no mobile payments such that it's unreasonable to depend on mobile payments.
I just came back from visiting SF and didn’t have to use cash at all; I had food, drink, I went to the grocery store....even Caltrain took credit cards (but it did 12 years ago). What did I do wrong?
Living in Seattle, I haven’t been to an ATM in 6 months. The last time I had to use cash was ironically in Boston China town (a cheap Banh Mi place wouldn’t take credit cards).
I had to use the BART the other day. The choices were $2.50 in cash or use a card where the minimum was $20 to fill a pass. I choose cash since I’m not from the Bay Area.
I don’t know about Seattle, but in California most recreational cannabis stores don’t accept card so that was another couple of hundred dollars I had to withdraw and use this week.
Caltrain accepts CC payments for single trip tickets, why is BART different?
Marijuana is unique because banks won’t go near it because the federal government still thinks weed is illegal. Marijuana dispensaries aren’t even allowed bank accounts as a result, something that would surely happen in China as well :).
Yeah, sorry I meant they either accept only cash or don't accept mobile payments. Most places take credit. But many still don't (often Asian / Mexican places). Even credit card is a poor experience, you insert the chip, have to wait like 15 seconds versus an instant QR scan that takes no time. And you have to do a signature with a pen...how antiquated!
My point was more that mobile payments are not ubiquitous yet, and enough places are cash only that you still have to think about carrying cash just in case. I only mention cash as an extreme, as opposed to China, where everywhere accepts mobile payments even like street food, which is funny given SF is a tech center.
Most chip cards have NFCs in them, you can do tap on many POS’s. It isn’t as nice as Australia where tap to pay is more ubiquitous, but I find it more convenient than fiddling with my phone to get a QR code up and under a camera.
The reason street food is not well developed in SF is that there simply isn’t much street food. If small store holders and credit card free food vans were more of a thing, well, they could use Square or something. A developed economy is basically just structured very differently from a developing one, where most consumer transactions occur between big businesses that have no problem using checks or CC or debit cards or ApplePay or whatever.
On the other hand, China never had checks and CCs never caught on, debit cards were eventually supported though in annoying ways (PIN AND sign, WTF???). CCs are even worse: in China, the burden of proof is in the consumer rather than the merchant, so Chinese CC holders are actively targeted abroad for fraud (eg restaurants in Bellevue WA targeting Chinese visitors with ICBC AmEx cards because they know ICBC is a shit bank). They skipped all that, and found QR codes and phones a great way to catch up. I think that is great, but they haven’t really surpassed the deceloped world l, they’ve just adapted well to their own situation.
But not if they cared about sales volume. That is just really dumb for an expensive impulse buy like alcohol. Even McDonalds can afford to take CCs these days.
That's not how cc fees works. McDonald's does such volume they pay a lot less. A nice restaurant selling those more expensive drinks does a lot less volume. So they pay more. and in the restaurant business margins like that matter. Upwards of 6.5 percent is a decent margin to lose.
