Parking meters

The tax obligation would consume 4 social security checks, maybe you could get a part time job to cover you gambling winnings.

She can get a prepaid MasterCar or Amex at Walgreens and many other grocery stores. But that’s not the point. They should accept cash, even if they have an additional fee to cover the supposed expense.

Having to report cash transactions in excess of $10,000 per customer per day is actually a federal requirement. I believe the business has to fill out a form.

If you already obtained something but didn’t pay for it, then they are required by law to accept cash from you.

Do you have more details please?

I believe the reloadable ones all require a tax ID number and the user might need to be an adult.

High volume places also usually don’t like to pay the transaction merchant fee associated with accepting cards!

Even gasbuddy.com doesn’t round up the $0.001 and lists the prices the same way that most people say them when they see the signs. I wonder if they could be sued for publishing false information?

Does anyone know if any gas station exists which doesn’t do the 0.001 pricing?

Before i retired 8 years ago, i worked for a company where we had some vending machines on the lobby level for drinks and candy. By that point, the only reason i still carried any cash was for those machines. Right before I retired at the end of 2015 the machines were replaced by new ones that also accepted plastic! I havent found any need for cash since.

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Card skimmers on those machines used to be a common way to steal credit cards. But now with smart cards the information can’t be stolen off of your card. They can still try to do a transaction somewhere else at the exact moment that your card is still in the card reader though.

We had the discussion a while back about all debts public and private and I was shown to be wrong. There is nothing that requires a business to accept cash if they don’t want to. If they are smart they will, but the law does not require it. Now if a local government wants to have an ordinance one way or another, that’s different and not federal law.

A bank is required to report cash cash transactions over $10,000 but I haven’t heard that requirement applied to businesses. Maybe so, I don’t know. I always have a couple hundred cash on me though and more in my little drawer at home. I like having $100 bills. Now my wife was off to Europe with about $60 in cash where I would have had a couple thousand. She sai no problem, I’ll just use the debit card for more. Phone call, debit card didn’t work, can I go down to the bank and clear up the problem? I’ll borrow cash from someone. Heh heh. Took a couple calls. Then I remember trying to use my debit card at Disney and it wouldn’t go through. Called the bank and discovered I had a daily limit. Who knew? So I like to have a little cash too.

Well, I would not advise you to put any money on it. You can buy gift cards all over the place, all you need is cash (or a credit card…) to buy one, no tax ID required… My local Kroger Supermarket sells 44 different cards, from “A” to “Z” ) to steal Amazon’s Thunder…" and they carry Amazon’s card, Starbucks, Target, Taco Bell, Lowes, Home Depot, and many, many more…

Some gift card charge a monthly fee, some charge this fee only after a year or two, and some charge no fee ever…

The Spend Card from my Credit Union is good almost everywhere… They do not charge a fee. I just have to go into my CU and they activate the card (I usually put a $1.00 on it. Then, depending on whom I am giving the card to, I will load more money on it. I can have as many as I want, no limit and I have numerous cards, most given out Grandkids. They look just like regular Charge Cards, have the 4-group, 4-digit number, they have an expiration date (about 6-years out…) and they have a CVV Number (Card Verification Value).

There are two types of Gift Card, Open-Loop or Closed-Loop. Open-Loop Card are valid all over… While a Closed-Loop Card is only good are that retailer… The Amazon Card is a Closed-Loop and only valid with Amazon…

If the Gift Card has “Visa” branded on the card even if it has Party Hut on it, that card is valid any where Visa is accepted…

So, it is incumbent on the buyer to do a bit of “due-diligence” and find out if the card is valid and accepted at only the Brand on the card or all over…

I would not buy a “Texas Roadhouse” Gift Card for a Vegetarian…

I’ve bought a lot of gift cards and all they want is a debit card or cash, not a check, so they know they got their money. Then the bearer can use. Don’t know about rechargeable cards though.

It’s been a long time since I have gone anywhere where I would need to pay for parking. In fact, the very idea of paying for parking, unless it is inside a parking garage or secure lot is unacceptable to me. I will not pay to park on a public street, and I don’t even like paying to park in a non-secured surface lot either. Anyone who is foolish enough to go to places where people are expected to pay for on-street parking is helping to support this scam.

About 10-years ago, my neighbor retired and as a retirement gift to himself he built a real shop building in his back yard, not the port-a-building he had been using. To stock it with wood working tools and equipment, he chose Grizzly tools and after he had shopped the catalog, he rented a U-haul and towed it from Southeast Virginia up to the plant in Pennsylvania. He shopped all day and chose his table saw, band saw, planer, drill press, etc… and had all the items unboxed and checked with final setup…

When it came time to pay, his card was rejected, he tried to get through to the card department, but no joy… He had a second card, but that was his small purchase card for ordering on-line with a much lower limit. With much embarrassment, he bought what he could with that lower limit card, which he told me that the cashier looked at very suspiciously…

He loaded the trailer with what he could afford and decided to stay the night since it took much longer than he expected, especially with the card rejection and having to eliminate numerous items…

After he got to the Hotel (which he paid for with that card that had been rejected…), he did get through to the credit card department and they told him it was rejected because of the unusually high amount, bought from a location he had never shopped previously… They apologized, and they justified it as they were just trying to protect him…

They told him that he should have called… At that point, he did tell them he called and got no answer, and then he called them something else…

The next morning, he went back to Grizzly and bought the rest of his items.

The moral of this that I learned is if I planned on ever using my credit cards for unusually high priced items (like we did when we bought the Honda Fit…) or from a location that we do not shop, we call first to avoid us going through this embarrassment…

I can see you don’t go very many places like airports or metro hospitals. You can park free maybe five miles away and the walk or take a taxi to the final destination. Or pay five dollars in the ramp with a walkway.

Kinda funny though, when I worked, most of our people were in the metro area where they had to pay $50 plus a month for parking. But we had offices scattered around the state where people didn’t pay for parking. One time the tried to make the people pay anyway even though parking was free. That didn’t go over very well and I won. They kept their free parking. I’m usually on the good guys side.

I think it was the united fund drive where I said anyone that contributes more than me will win my coveted paid inside parking stall for a week. No one came close except one guy, so I lost. In the morning I would throw the bike in the trunk, drive the 50 miles, find a street parking stall within a couple mile, and bike the rest of the way. Never did that again, and the guy never even said thank you.

And you are wrong . There are many places that people work that have to plug street parking meters or pay a monthly fee at a parking lot or garage . They are not foolish , they just don’t have choice.

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Because of a situation where someone buys a $500+$6 gift card using a credit card which has reward points. The $500 goes through some card processing system and in to the person’s bank, which is then used to pay off their credit card. They can buy $5000 + $60 in fees for gift cards and then end up with a couple hundred dollars in airline miles or whatever for a bit over $60 in fees.

+1
At this point, the only place where I normally have to use cash is the car wash. No doubt they will start accepting “plastic” in the future.

Even road tolls are moving toward “cashless”. For those like me, who don’t have a need for an EZ Pass subscription, there are now gantries with cameras above the former toll plazas on the PA Turnpike and the NY Thruway. You get a bill in the mail at the end of the billing period. When NJ finally goes the same route with our toll roads, I won’t even need to use cash to pay the toll when I occasionally use the NJ Turnpike or Garden State Parkway.

I like to keep an emergency cash reserve of ~$800 in the house… just in case. Three years after I last replenished it, I still have over $700 sitting in my file cabinet.

You are correct Volvo, in Nashville there is very little parking downtown and it is all pay to park for the most part during business hours… And come game day or concert time, holly crap does the pay to park go way up, 3 to 4 times the normal amount…
Uber/Lift made it much more affordable to work in Nashville when they 1st came out cause you could park outer parts and Uber into downtown area… It was much cheaper during games and events also… Then as with everything they got greedy and started charging Premium rates… still cheaper then parking though…

These two issues are pet peeves of mine. If you expect me to visit your restaurant, store, museum, office, I expect you to provide me a place to park. That just seems like common courtesy. I think things like major league sporting events and state fairs are different, but I just can’t understand paying for parking at the doctor.

As for toll roads, nonsense. Just another money grab. I pay property tax, sales tax, excise tax on my car, gasoline tax on the fuel. I have paid over and over for that road, and then you want me to pay again every time I use it? There have been tolls imposed to pay for a new/upgraded bridge, but that has a clear end in sight and the toll will be gone when the bridge is paid for. I was on the east coast and I believe there the tolls are forever?

Yes, the tolls here are essentially forever. I rode over the Ben Franklin bridge yesterday. It’s between my house and Philadelphia. There is a $5.00 one-way toll. The bridge was built in 1926, so it has long since been paid for, however maintenance costs on a long suspension bridge are ongoing and increase as the bridge ages.

Those bridges require annual maintenance, and the roads require periodic repaving, in addition to… sometimes… widening. Nobody likes taxes, but if tolls were not charged, then every taxpayer–including those who don’t drive–would have to pay for the maintenance costs of the roads and bridges.

Near me, a 2 lane non-toll state highway that has been in need of widening for at least 50 years is finally being widened. Those costs are subsidized by tolls on other roads. And–for the first time that I ever recall–the state just “fired” the road construction contractor for incompetence, after DOT inspectors found defect after defect, even after being warned to clean up their act.

The good news is that the new road contractor should be more competent, but the bad news is that the down-time between contractors means that the job is going to take even longer than originally projected. But, I guess that since the project was already 50 years behind the times, a few extra months is not significant.

Very true, and if you and I are not around to see that road widened, our descendants will be.

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Is that the same secret file cabinet where you keep those old magazines with the great car advertisements? :wink:

No, those magazines fill several containers in my basement.
:grinning: