Is the CASHLESS Society Coming? Can Businesses Refuse Cash?

but it's legal tender you must accept it by law this is a conversation I've heard a number of times and again just recently but to be fair just recently was in a slightly different context it was in the context that it should be illegal for businesses to refuse to accept legal tender but of course it's not I was called out for saying the business can choose how it accepts its payments which is absolutely true much to the dismay of the person leaving the comment but even the story itself seems to be a rehash of an old story that was debunked by reuter's factchecking team in 2022 you see the new sign appears to be the same as the old one that was debunked that says we're going cashless from the 1st of October 24 we'll now only be accepting card contactless and Starbucks rewards payments this is markedly like the original sign that said we're going cashless from the 1st of October 2022 only accepting card contact less and whatever payments and in this one the uh spokesperson for stbu said that the claims circulating in the UK the US Canada in late August 22 that all Starbucks are going cashless are false and whilst it may have applied to one shop it was unverified by Thompson Reuters and thus they were unsure that it was true at all but the spokesperson for Starbucks said that it was wrong but this didn't stop lots of people in that comment thread talking about legal tender and whether businesses should be forced to accept it but as I said in that thread legal tender is very widely misunderstood legal tender is actually only that which is currently valid tender according to the bank of England in this jurisdiction obviously now interestingly enough some people say that um all coins everything else is legal tender but that's not always the case which is a point I'll come on to in this video but then people argue well what is legal tender how does it work and if I offer to pay a debt in legal tender when the debt is created you must accept it and all of this sort of stuff and so they say when they've offered to buy something or taken something off the shelf they've created a debt and therefore the shop must accept the legal tender a settlement of that debt that's not quite true either as I say with respect wholly misconceived in most cases so what is legal tender how do it really work well it only really works in the case of when a debt is created and there's a dispute over it it provides some sort of a defense in that it provides the defense of tender for claim now under our civil procedure rules 37.2 where someone wants to rely on this defense from being sued if they pay what is currently legal tender into court which is another thing I'll come on to in a minute when they pay that into court as a defense of wholly paying the money before they get sued this then allows them to rely on this defense of tender before claim and so they pay this amount into the court of office and if they don't pay it in accordance with these rules then they can't rely on that defense that's really when tender comes into play now interestingly some people then say well I will pay all of it in one or two pence coins but that's not really the case either because one and two pence coins only amount to legal tender for anything up to 20 P so you can't just simply go in and pay all of it in 2 p coins but interestingly enough I know someone that's tried to um go through this process and actually pay the money into court as a defensive tender before claim and the court office wouldn't accept the coins and it was unclear as to how they were actually supposed to pay it in which is how novel this is but the interesting point here is whether or not businesses should be forced to take what is legal tender cash and coin as a method of payment now of course they don't have to businesses can choose how they accept payment they could accept payment in gummy bears or sweets or whatever they like for that matter um just like when you get shops or drive-throughs or whatever that say they don't accept A50 note at least unless they've checked them thoroughly and even then they might say sorry we're not accepting that this does raise various questions that I've seen in previous videos online where someone's had a commemorative coin they've previously called up the organization in question to say do you accept these coins and they've said well yeah I suppose so so then they've turned up to pay with it and then they've had the police turn up because they've the place has refused to accept this commemorative coin as a form of payment they've called the police the police have turned up arrested arrested them for making off without payment but of course the flaw in that was that they were not dishonestly making off without payment because they'd already checked that the establishment accepted these coins so it wasn't dishonest so it was a wrongful arrest so I understand they were paid out thousands of pounds for wrongful arrest not that I'm encouraging anyone to do that this was just what happened and my comment on it but if if you know that a business does not accept cash uh or coin and you walk in and you take something away it does create this element of Doubt as to whether it's dishonest on their part if you can prove that they knew that it doesn't accept cash for example they were Silly enough to put a social media post to say I'm going to walk in and walk out with this stuff even though I know they don't accept cash but I'm just going to leave my cash on the table that could technically amount to theft because they've dishonestly appropriated something because they know they don't accept cash so one of the reasons these companies might not want to accept cash well for One banks have different tariffs on how these businesses can pay money in for example there's usually an electronic exchange tariff whereby it's much much cheaper to have all of their payments come through electronically by merchants and so on cards you know credit even if it's credit cards or debit cards and it might be much more expensive to accept payment into the bank in the form of cash some of them even have a specific set payment per coin that they pay in so I remember one case where somebody was in dispute because someone wanted to pay an invoice and they're in a dispute over the invoice and they said fine I'll go and pay it I'll go and pay it into the bank in cash and knowing because they knew the business knowing that that account would charge the other person something in the region of 20 P or whatever it was per coin that they paid in and obviously they knew that if they paid in a smaller coin nomination than that 10 P or whatever then the other side was actually going to lose out because the bank was going to charge them 20 P per coin and if they paid in in 10 you get the picture So that obviously caused a bit of a dis dispute there because whilst they technically paid the money into the bank it knowingly had caused the other part a loss by doing so but at what point did that become dishonest or illegal because it wasn't it wasn't their fault that the bank charge them more to pay in a coin than the coin was worth but did they do it knowing that it was going to cause a loss to the other party was that dishonest well now we have new tests of what is dishonest a test now for dishonesty is whatever an ordinary reasonable person thinks is dishonest it's changed from the old definition the old test was both whether an ordinary reasonable person would think it's dishonest and whether the defendant thought that it was dishonest in a dishonesty offense now it's much simpler than that um after go replaced with gentin casinos and so this whole idea of legal tender you cannot walk in and insist that a business accepts cash there may be a number of reasons they don't accept cash one of which being the banking charges that I've just mentioned another being the risk of having a robbery and putting the staff at risk from having the cash stolen the physical practicalities of someone taking the cash from the store to the bank anything over and above the float that they keep in the tills and there are lots of complications with cash granted lots of people still use cash and want to use cash and want to insist that businesses take cash and say that they will vote with their feet if the business doesn't accept cash but ultimately if a business takes the decision that it's a much smaller percentage of people on on the whole that uses cash then they might say well we know we're going to lose out on that of business but it's worth it because we would rather just everybody conform to the same method of payment personally um I almost never use cash unless someone insists on receiving cash which is not very often and so I just in fact I use Apple pay or whatever so I'm perfectly fine with that but I do understand that certain people have a problem because they might be debanked they might not have a bank they might not have ready access to make these payments so for them it would be a real problem but then I would whine that back and say well what is it that made them get debanked in the first place it may or may not be a genuine bonafied reason that if for example there's a serious allegation of fraud they might end up on the the seast database and therefore the banks might just close all of their accounts and they have it in their terms and conditions that they can do that and therefore the person may not have a card with which to make payment anyway so all these things can cause problems but making a business accept legal tender it is not that's just not the case so I hope that's served to address some of the questions that come up in recent conversations I hope you found it useful uh please do subscribe if it is thank you for watching and I'll see you next time