Story time: A relative of a former coworker had been laid-off from their bank job during the global financial crisis in 2008, but then picked up a position as a Colorado cannabis dispensary's CFO (their first).
When he arrived for his first day on the job, he discovered that employees were making cash pickups from the dispensaries using their personal automobiles. So they were having an hourly employee driving around in a Honda Civic with $50,000 or more in small unmarked bills the trunk. When they arrived back at the office, they would re-count the bills then store them in a plain steel filing cabinet. Like you'd buy at Office Depot.
The first thing he did was order some burglary-rated safes and got rid of the filing cabinets.
Then he called some of the armored car companies (cash-in-transit firms), and was surprised to find they didn't want his business! It turns out their main customers (banks and credit unions) were VERY concerned over getting his drug cash mixed up with their customer's cash through a mix-up inside the truck. Marijuana sales were (and still are) illegal at the federal level. Even though the cannabis business was legal in Colorado, banks are regulated at the federal level via the Comptroller of the Currency and they couldn't take the chance of their cash being intermingled.
To solve this problem he started a subsidiary armored car business and ordered new vehicles for it (had them painted with green leafs on them..) They would only be used to transport dispensary cash. He even called his counterparts at other dispensaries and sold them on using his new firm for their cash transport woes. This was successful and he now has competition in the transport business.
To continue on his entrepreneurial arc, he set up another subsidiary to manage their real estate transactions. They were having problems acquiring new locations for their dispensaries as real estate sales are also subject to federal scrutiny via the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
No fault of the author, but I personally would have been more interested in how much of a difference this makes rather than the history of it. I have no issue with the practice in principle.
Over here in South Africa CIT (cash-in-transit) incidents were (possibly still are) a major issue. When I still paid attention to it in the 00's there were periods where multiple incidents a week would occur with an MO of hijacked luxury cars (e.g. BMW's) being used to ram CIT trucks while they were travelling on highways.
This ultimately led to measures such as:
- Far more armour on CIT vehicles.
- The cash always being in dye stain protected containers during transit, which led to another temporary problem at casino's where automated chip vendor machines were used to launder this literally dirty money.
- Higher fees on cash deposits by banks/CIT companies, which incentivized merchants to discourage use of cash.
These days I require cash so rarely that I pretty much never carry any on me and for a while (until they had all modernized) would leave negative Google business reviews for shopping centres that didn't accept bank cards on their parking machines.
We have a premium grocery chain which has 80% of their tills being cashless and it's so much better for efficiency of payment, especially with things like Apple Pay where you don't even have to enter a PIN. It's invariably always painful when I occasionally need to use one of the non-premium grocery chains where most clientele still use cash. Just the cash part alone of their transaction typically takes more time than my having my few items rung up and paid for by tapping my iPhone, from the moment I get to the till itself I can be walking away in less than 60 seconds.
And then I can't help but notice at shopping centres the often queues of less privileged population waiting sometimes more than 10 minutes at ATMs to be able to draw cash.
When you consider how much slower cash is to be drawn from ATMs and then processed at till points then how much more it costs to safely get it to banks, it's a significant drain on our economy. You may be asking yourself now why it is that if cards are so much better than cash here it is still so widely used? Well, that's because of bank fees.
Someone like me with a credit card essentially pays nothing extra per transaction, but most of our population has debit cards only and each use of it at an ATM or till point has a minimum fee of something like R2 per R100 (~5USD) "drawn". So, of course for the portion of the population where every cent counts, they will draw exact increments of R100 from an ATM and pay for everything using cash.
In other words, the bank's business model of charging a minimum non-percentage-based fee for every transaction from which they ultimately make a complete fortune, is essentially done by taxing the entire economy with all the inefficiencies of cash.
I realize that (culturally) a significant portion of the US population feels that continued use of cash is essential to prevent a totalitarian government, but in the face of all these inefficiencies of cash I have to wonder how tenable this (arguably very important) philosophy will remain. And yes, I'm aware of the "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." quote which I don't entirely disagree with, but it's hard to practice too.
Story time: A relative of a former coworker had been laid-off from their bank job during the global financial crisis in 2008, but then picked up a position as a Colorado cannabis dispensary's CFO (their first).
When he arrived for his first day on the job, he discovered that employees were making cash pickups from the dispensaries using their personal automobiles. So they were having an hourly employee driving around in a Honda Civic with $50,000 or more in small unmarked bills the trunk. When they arrived back at the office, they would re-count the bills then store them in a plain steel filing cabinet. Like you'd buy at Office Depot.
The first thing he did was order some burglary-rated safes and got rid of the filing cabinets.
Then he called some of the armored car companies (cash-in-transit firms), and was surprised to find they didn't want his business! It turns out their main customers (banks and credit unions) were VERY concerned over getting his drug cash mixed up with their customer's cash through a mix-up inside the truck. Marijuana sales were (and still are) illegal at the federal level. Even though the cannabis business was legal in Colorado, banks are regulated at the federal level via the Comptroller of the Currency and they couldn't take the chance of their cash being intermingled.
To solve this problem he started a subsidiary armored car business and ordered new vehicles for it (had them painted with green leafs on them..) They would only be used to transport dispensary cash. He even called his counterparts at other dispensaries and sold them on using his new firm for their cash transport woes. This was successful and he now has competition in the transport business.
To continue on his entrepreneurial arc, he set up another subsidiary to manage their real estate transactions. They were having problems acquiring new locations for their dispensaries as real estate sales are also subject to federal scrutiny via the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
>Stay tuned for Part 2 where I explore the why for this practice.
Took me a minute or two scrolling through the article before I found what I was looking for, at the very end.
awfully long definition of "brandishing." And as usual, laws don't apply if you have enough money.
No fault of the author, but I personally would have been more interested in how much of a difference this makes rather than the history of it. I have no issue with the practice in principle.
Over here in South Africa CIT (cash-in-transit) incidents were (possibly still are) a major issue. When I still paid attention to it in the 00's there were periods where multiple incidents a week would occur with an MO of hijacked luxury cars (e.g. BMW's) being used to ram CIT trucks while they were travelling on highways.
This ultimately led to measures such as:
- Far more armour on CIT vehicles.
- The cash always being in dye stain protected containers during transit, which led to another temporary problem at casino's where automated chip vendor machines were used to launder this literally dirty money.
- Higher fees on cash deposits by banks/CIT companies, which incentivized merchants to discourage use of cash.
These days I require cash so rarely that I pretty much never carry any on me and for a while (until they had all modernized) would leave negative Google business reviews for shopping centres that didn't accept bank cards on their parking machines.
We have a premium grocery chain which has 80% of their tills being cashless and it's so much better for efficiency of payment, especially with things like Apple Pay where you don't even have to enter a PIN. It's invariably always painful when I occasionally need to use one of the non-premium grocery chains where most clientele still use cash. Just the cash part alone of their transaction typically takes more time than my having my few items rung up and paid for by tapping my iPhone, from the moment I get to the till itself I can be walking away in less than 60 seconds.
And then I can't help but notice at shopping centres the often queues of less privileged population waiting sometimes more than 10 minutes at ATMs to be able to draw cash.
When you consider how much slower cash is to be drawn from ATMs and then processed at till points then how much more it costs to safely get it to banks, it's a significant drain on our economy. You may be asking yourself now why it is that if cards are so much better than cash here it is still so widely used? Well, that's because of bank fees.
Someone like me with a credit card essentially pays nothing extra per transaction, but most of our population has debit cards only and each use of it at an ATM or till point has a minimum fee of something like R2 per R100 (~5USD) "drawn". So, of course for the portion of the population where every cent counts, they will draw exact increments of R100 from an ATM and pay for everything using cash.
In other words, the bank's business model of charging a minimum non-percentage-based fee for every transaction from which they ultimately make a complete fortune, is essentially done by taxing the entire economy with all the inefficiencies of cash.
I realize that (culturally) a significant portion of the US population feels that continued use of cash is essential to prevent a totalitarian government, but in the face of all these inefficiencies of cash I have to wonder how tenable this (arguably very important) philosophy will remain. And yes, I'm aware of the "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." quote which I don't entirely disagree with, but it's hard to practice too.