城市和州正在对无现金商店说不

城市和州正在对无现金商店说不

After almost 10 minutes of standing in line at a coffee shop, Ritchie Torres realized he only had cash in his pocket — a form of payment no longer accepted by this store.

在一家咖啡店里排了近10分钟的队后，里奇·托雷斯意识到他口袋里只有现金——这家咖啡店不再接受这种付款方式。

"It was a humiliating experience," he said. "I remember wondering aloud, how could a business refuse to accept cash, which is legal tender?"

“这是一次耻辱的经历，”他说。“我记得我曾大声问自己，一个企业怎么能拒绝接受现金呢?现金是法定货币。”

Torres is a City Council member in New York. He says his constituents, especially seniors, have also complained about a spurt of cashless stores. So Torres led the charge on a bill to ban businesses from rejecting cash, which New York's city leaders passed almost unanimously last month.

托雷斯是纽约市议会议员。他说，他的选民，尤其是老年人，也抱怨无现金商店的激增。因此，托雷斯领导了一项禁止企业拒收现金的法案，上个月，纽约市领导人几乎一致通过了这项法案。

A similar ban is slated for a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 13. In the past year, Philadelphia, San Francisco and the state of New Jersey have also banned cashless stores — a rare case of governments fighting a tech trend before it spreads far. Massachusetts has required establishments to accept cash since 1978.

类似的禁令将于2月13日在华盛顿特区举行听证会。在过去的一年里，费城、旧金山和新泽西州也禁止了无现金商店——这是政府在科技潮流蔓延之前就与之抗争的罕见案例。自1978年以来，马萨诸塞州一直要求企业接受现金。

"A cashless economy is not an inclusive economy," said Tazra Mitchell, policy director at the research and advocacy group DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

“无现金经济不是包容性经济，”研究和倡导组织华盛顿特区财政政策研究所的政策主任塔兹拉·米切尔说。

Excluding people from paying with cash means "essentially discriminating against people who are low-income, people who are homeless, also undocumented," she said.

不让人们用现金支付意味着“本质上歧视低收入者、无家可归者和无证移民，”她说。

Getting a credit or debit card often requires a form of ID, a utility or another bill, money to deposit and a financial history. Mitchell said that in Washington, D.C., nearly a third of residents rely on cash every day because they don't have a card or even a bank account.

获得信用卡或借记卡通常需要身份证、公用事业或其他账单、存款和财务记录。米切尔说，在华盛顿特区，近三分之一的居民每天依靠现金，因为他们没有信用卡，甚至没有银行账户。

In fact, as cities have cracked down on the cashless economy and spurred new conversations about whom it leaves out, some of the biggest names that tried going cashless — Amazon's automated convenience store Go and salad chain Sweetgreen — have reversed their policies in favor of accepting cash.

事实上，随着城市对无现金经济的打击，引发了人们对无现金经济的新讨论，一些尝试无现金的大公司——亚马逊的自动便利店Go和沙拉连锁店Sweetgreen——已经改变了他们的政策，转而接受现金。

"Going cashless had ... positive results, but it also had the unintended consequence of excluding those who prefer to pay or can only pay with cash," Sweetgreen officials wrote in a post.

“无现金化……有积极的结果，但它也有意想不到的后果，将那些更喜欢或只能用现金支付的人排除在外，”Sweetgreen的官员在一篇帖子中写道。

These reversals show that the market is working to respond to its communities, said National Retail Federation General Counsel Stephanie Martz. She said new laws are "a solution in search of a problem" as the number of businesses to go cashless is very small — in part because each card transaction comes with a fee the business has to pay.

全美零售联合会总法律顾问马茨说，这些逆转表明市场正在努力对社区做出反应。她说，新的法律是“寻找问题的解决方案”，因为无现金业务的数量非常少，部分原因是每笔信用卡交易都需要支付一定的费用。

Credit card companies, which get a cut every time a card is swiped, have rewarded the cashless trend. For example, in 2018. Visa paid $10.000 each to 50 businesses that stopped accepting cash.

每次刷卡都会有提成的信用卡公司，对无现金的趋势给予了回报。例如，在2018年，Visa向50家停止接受现金的企业支付了每家1万美元。

And indeed, cash is becoming less popular among U.S. shoppers. The Federal Reserve found in 2018 that cash had stopped being the No. 1 payment choice — overtaken by debit cards.

事实上，现金在美国消费者中越来越不受欢迎。美联储在2018年发现，现金不再是第一支付选择——被借记卡取代。

But cash is still the most common way people pay amounts under $10 or $25 — especially among those older than 55 and younger than 25. And some people prefer cash for privacy reasons — to protect their purchase history from being tracked by advertisers or banks.

但现金仍然是人们支付10美元或25美元以下金额的最常见方式，尤其是在55岁以上和25岁以下的人群中。有些人出于隐私原因更喜欢现金，以保护他们的购买记录不被广告商或银行跟踪。

Cash also might carry potential psychological and financial benefits for consumers.

现金也可能为消费者带来潜在的心理和经济利益。