New York City has leveled tens of thousands of dollars in fines so far on businesses not taking payments in cash, a New York Post report says.
The report says the city has fined 23 businesses for such violations – including Van Leeuwen, an ice cream parlor, which has seen $12,750 in fines for being cashless across several locations in the city. The report says Van Leeuwen has a sign notifying users that it doesn’t take cash.
The ban was passed by City Council in January of 2020 and took effect in November that year. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection got 152 complaints about the cashless businesses. There were six complaints about the Van Leeuwen stores since the ban went into effect in Nov. 2020, the report says.
The law makes it so businesses have to accept cash unless they have a machine to convert cash to a prepaid cash – and they’re not allowed to charge more for cash payments.
Of the reports, 16 businesses have been found guilty. The fines total $23,850.
Some city officials aren’t in favor of the ban.
“These agencies weaponize our statutes to torment small businesses in this city,” Councilman Kalman Yeger said, per the report. “This is about raising revenue for the city.”
The idea came about because businesses were more often going cashless as a way to try and prevent COVID-19 spreading.
The ban has supporters who say going cashless is discriminatory against minors and poor people who don’t always have bank accounts or credit cards.
The move away from cash has been happening for some time, with Latin American nations seeing huge surges in digital banking during the pandemic. Digital wallets and contactless payments, especially at the height of the pandemic in 2020, became the chief ways people had to pay for things, with businesses closing their physical locations.
That caused cash to decline in relevance.
Kushki Chief Revenue Officer Madeleine Clavijo told PYMNTS the ease of opening a digital wallet account made it an optimal way to transition away from cash as well – along with the lesser risks compared to using cash.
See more: Cash No Longer King in Latin America
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