Lawmakers in New Jersey are trying to ban cashless stores entirely.
So retail titans Amazon and Walmart got involved with the situation.
Sometime in June 2018, the lawmakers of New Jersey came together to try and ban cashless stores. The Garden State actually seems to have a pretty noble reason for trying to take this action.
The reason New Jersey set the ball rolling for a cashless system was because cashless stores were becoming more and more frequent. It was starting to alienate the poorer consumers who simply don’t have a credit card. People who don’t even have a bank accounts. New Jersey lawmakers observed this problem and decided it was finally time to take action.
“I’ve heard that this is going on,” Jake Kaiser, a philosophy major at Cabrini University, said. “I can see how a lot of people would have problems with this, if they don’t have a card or are poor or if they just don’t have their credit card on them at the time.”
New Jersey was attempting in following the footsteps of Massachusetts, who has managed to maintained the law of having no cashless stores in it’s state. Though this was done in 1978, a time period where online shopping wasn’t even remotely prevalent to all businesses as it is in present day.
“I think it’s best to have both,” Emma Turnbach, junior psychology major at Cabrini University, said. “I wouldn’t want just [cash or credit], plus I feel like you’d be losing business in some aspect if you’re only accepting one or the other.”
Online shopping is huge in our world today. Which is probably why New Jersey is having a hard time passing the law in the first place.
With online shopping being a huge chunk of revenue for most markets and retail stores it’s hard to try and take away such a convenient method of pay from them. According to TechCrunch.com “Eight in 10 Americans online shop” with a statistic of 89 percent of Americans being online shoppers.
“I don’t really ever use cash, so I can see why these stores are doing this, but I can also see why people would have a problem with it,” Nick Piscitelli, a business and tech major at Cabrini University, said. “It seems a little odd that any store would get rid of something that’s been in place for centuries.”
So why is this a problem? The bill doesn’t affect online shopping, so why is refusing the usage of just card causing titans of industry Walmart and Amazon to be all up in arms? Well, it’s complicated.
No really, that’s the reason.
Most businesses will switch to a no cash model to increase efficiency and lower the risk of robbery. Stores like Walmart and Amazon have started to implement a new way of online shopping in certain retail locations. in these stores the customer can scan the items themselves and they will be charged to an online account.
While currently already owning a cashless bookstore in the Garden State Plaza mall, Amazon definitely has plans for more cashless locations. But they aren’t wrong for wanting to do so. According to a U.S Bank Cash Behavior survey only about 76% of people carry 50 dollars or less with them at a time.
Although it currently remains a bill in New Jersey, if this were to become a law, the penalties could be pretty intense for stores that try to stay cashless. Up to 20,000 dollars for the highest offense.
