193
No credit card? No smartphone? No parking: Parks Canada ditches cash option at Rideau Canal lots
(ottawacitizen.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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When I decide to visit a park and arrive to find that I can't pay cash, it's a problem. Visiting a park is a transient event, there does not need to be ANY permanent relation between myself and the park operator. There is no reason to require trusting some random site with payment details, generating another set of account credentials, and installing some mystery app that wants way too many permissions just to visit a park.
But those are all details that pertain to a specific type of digital payment. Like I said in a different comment, sign me up for better digital payment options and increased privacy guarantees. Sticking to cash is not the only way to achieve this.
But cash exists right now. There is no reason to drop support for it.
I mean, there are reasons. But I'm not really advocating for businesses to stop accepting cash, I'm more like curious on why people hold on to having to carry cash so dearly.
Ah, I misunderstood your meaning.
Personally I'm not a cash guy, I used a debit card for 99% of transactions. If the machine looks sketchy I'll use a credit card as there is better financial protection at the cost of privacy. But for transient, time sensitive, interactions, like a park I only visit once a year or a fast food place that I may never come back to, I want them to take cash. If there is a problem with their electronic payment system (their site is broken, their cloud provider is broken, their cloud provider's ISP is down, ...all the way to local network trouble) now I am being denied access to physical thing that does not physically rely on electronic infrastructure.
My angry example above of needing to make an account to visit a park actually happened to me this week for an Ontario Provincial Park. It was extremely frustrating because there were no employees present to take payment that day, only a large sign with a QR code instructing everyone to pay online. Now every person in the line of cars a head of me had to scan the code, make an account, fill in their info, etc. Had there been a machine present to take cash (even if it was exact change only), most people could have scraped the coins out of their cup holder in half the time it took to interact with their phone.