Get it!?
New York is one of the biggest, craziest, wealthiest cities in the world. Everything happens here first; it’s kind of like that scene in The Devil Wears Prada. Meryl Streep’s terrifying fashion editor character explains how a trendsetting chartreuse blouse starts life on a Paris runway, and goes to die as a sad, tired nylon sweater in the Gap’s bargain bin. This analogy only works if you equate New York with Paris, and everywhere else with the Gap.
Shoddy metaphors aside, New York still partakes in a particularly anachronistic practice:
The cash-only establishment.
I’ll preface this by saying cash-only tends to occur more often in Brooklyn than Manhattan. However, it appears in the weirdest of places- restaurants, bars, and the hair salon a block away from my Williamsburg apartment.
The salon in question is Hair Metal. I absolutely adore Hair Metal, because they offer a reasonably-priced women’s haircut ($60) in my trendy-ass neighborhood. Plus, you get to listen to heavy metal while you get your hair did. Pretty sweet, right?
Well, after my most recent haircut, I attempted to pay with a debit card.
“Cash only,” said the tattooed front desk guy. “But there’s an ATM across the street at the laundromat.”
So, I had no choice but to run across the street and take out cash. My bank doesn’t have any locations in the area, which meant I had to pay the off-brand ATM a $2 fee. My bank also doesn’t like it when I don’t use their ATM’s, and hit me with a $2 fee on their side.
A $60 haircut really costs $65, because you have to tip your stylist. And the extra ATM fees meant I paid $70 for a haircut, all because the salon didn’t take my debit card.
I understand why some businesses won’t run a credit/debit card purchase under $10. Every time one of those transactions goes through, the business has to pay a fee to the credit companies. This is lame. I totally get a $10 minimum, because it has to be worth their while to run a credit card transaction.
But to not be able to use a debit card on a $60 transaction is slightly ridiculous. That’s quite a bit of cash for me to carry around (meaning I might lose it). I also have to keep a mental list of which businesses don’t accept credit/debit cards. If I forget, that means another $4 in extra fees. And that makes me cranky.
New York, get your act together. Join the debit card revolution! Your customers will thank you for it.
Broke in NYC 
Those places need to get square.
Paris drives me nuts because the whole no-debit-card-under-10-euros is de rigeur pretty much everywhere unless it’s Monoprix.
Also annoying: in France, you have to pay a fee every trimester to have a debit card (uh huh) and if you sign up for the cheapo ones, they put a cap on how much you can spend per week. ie, I could only spend 300 euros in one seven-day period (as in seven days in a row, not from Sunday to Saturday), which I discovered when I really, desperately needed to spend more than 300 euros in a seven-day period.
Wow, that’s crazy. I didn’t know that about France. Did you find that it ultimately helped to control spending? Or was it too limiting?