France starts moving government systems from Windows to Linux

[themadhippy]

The grocery store will charge you a fee if you don't let them collect your information by presenting a loyalty card.

Meanwhile the  uk's cheapest supermarket dont do loyalty cards

[Cyclotron]

The grocery store will charge you a fee if you don't let them collect your information by presenting a loyalty card.

Meanwhile the  uk's cheapest supermarket dont do loyalty cards

Actually, that's true for the US too. I'm just being dramatic. I just get grumpy seeing companies do everything possible to increase revenue but make their services better.  See the US ISP market for the worst of the worst.

Aldis is German, so is Trader Joe's. Aldis is cheap and requires no loyalty card. Joes is moderate to more expensive.
Food Lion, one of my area's largest grocery stores, is actually a Dutch company; they pretty much require loyalty cards for the best pricing.
Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Giant Food, are also Dutch and may be the same mega corp as Food Lion.

7-Eleven, one of the largest convenience stores in the US, is owned by a Japanese company. The US is heavily diversified in foreign ownership of lots of stuff.

Canada owns about 30% of the foreign-owned agricultural land and forests in the US.
The Netherlands holds about 12%, Italy 6%, the UK 6%, and Germany 5%.  China makes the news a lot with its 1%.

Foreign-held assets and resources within the US are substantial. With France kicking off, "we are doing our own thing and won't buy from a US company, they may find the US reciprocates and doesn't buy from French companies. Not the best of outcomes, but the potential is there. All it takes is a viral video, and suddenly, the US consumer goes elsewhere. It has hit some companies pretty hard when it happens. Ask Anheuser-Busch InBev how they felt about that Bud Light fiasco.

T-Mobile, Siemens, British Petroleum, Shell, Nestle, Stellantis, Sodexo, Danone, L'Oreal, LVMH, Snieder Electric, Michelin, and these are just some of the big money brands. BP Shell has been the most valued company in the US at various times.  Wonder how it would play out in the news if the US said it wouldn't buy from any of these companies.

The knee-jerk reactions to issues in global politics aren't surprising. What used to be statesmen and women who represented people globally are nothing more than bullies, all of them on the same playground picking noes and fights. Citizens sit back and cheer on their teams.

[Simon]

 In essence, if a merchant sells you a product for cash at a lower price than CC, they would be in breach. It's like forcing the merchant to make more money on cash transactions. Of course, the products all have fees incorporated into the prices, as well as the taxes that governments impose on the OEM, the wholesaler, and the merchant.

But cash has fees as well, at least in the UK. Banks started offering "free" accounts, but nothing is free, they went ryan air style with business banking, "oh but you want that  thing, oh that's going to incur a fee". If I showed up at my bank and presented them an amount of cash to deposit into my business account I would be charged a similar fee to what stripe charges me to take a card payment, not to mention my time and as I mentioned earlier the cost of parking in town.

I remember as a child being amazed by the pod in tube transport system in the supermarket watching the cashiers count up the money, put it into the pods and send it up tubes from each till - often. They don't have those anymore, and I'm sure the supermarket does not miss them. I'm sure they had a cost, not only to install but also to maintain and run, the cashiers time counting the cash out and putting it in there. So even from the moment a customer hands over cash there is an immediate overhead cost, just to get it from the cash machine to the office upstairs where no doubt another human was counting it out.

The last time I used cash in a supermarket, despite the cash machine telling the "kid" how much to give me they struggled to translate that into individual coins.

Larger businesses asking for cash are run by idiots who think their workers must just need something to do, small businesses encouraging cash are tax evaders. My wife works for a charity shop chain and they encourage cash, but then it takes 15-30 minutes at the end of each day for 2 employees to deal with it, so 0.5-1hr of labour a day, that is about 1% of the cash takings and that is not taking into account the extra time a cash transaction takes and with a que of people at the tills you need more people on tills.

[free_electron]

The last time I used cash in a supermarket, despite the cash machine telling the "kid" how much to give me they struggled to translate that into individual coins.

I have seen cash registers at a local store here (Safeway) that actually show a picture of the cash drawer to "the kid" showing how much of each bin he need to return.... It doesn't show values, just 2 of this , three of that bin... You can only hope the bin has the right denominations in it... And the coins come out of an automated dispenser.

[m k]

Here many places are card only, cash is too expensive.

Small specialty shops or places where walk in customer is an exception may still have a triple system.
A computer for sales, a payment terminal for cards and a cash register for book keeping.

Piggy bank, no idea how much its service fee is today.
Some banks have a coin machine for deposits and self serving it can be free, 1k of coins a month is max for one bank.
There's possibly also a note to coins machine, maybe a change is needed before you can deposit piggy bank notes for free.