The Wax Conspiracy

Credit card breaches are favours to cash only establishments

Another day another data breach, and on goes through the wallet to swap out the credit cards while they wait on for replacements. Cash-only is the chaser, and the primary reason to keep up the breaches.

Between waving the plastic or even dipping the chip and wadding up bills of cash, the latter is going to be more below the radar and off-book than the former. Naturally.

Getting customers to walkabout and ring up with cash is a tricky deal. The convenience of plastic is so hard to pass up. It’s easier on the spine to sit on than tilting folds of polymer and less clingy than coins that burn through a sweaty thigh. An actual data breach could also cost whatever in fines and sloppy wrist-slaps. That’s certainly one way to fuss things up.

The other is to spread the rumour that your establishment has a history of bad seeds stealing credit card info and that the best way to get through is with cold grimy cash. Then, it’s an arms race. Either your digs are that good that people will still shop and walk in with actual cash, or they succumb to the fear of having credit card details stolen because that’s all they know how to shop with now.

Credit cards with loosened lips feel like they happen a lot more the closer the goods are to passing through your maw and colon. That cannot be too much of an outside coincidence. Fast food purchases are much smaller than the online buys that something has to make up for that frequency in merchant fees. And a paper and polymer trail manages to vanish with a lighter footprint than a digital one.

Ethan Switch

Written on Saturday, 31 March 2018

The Wax Conspiracy

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