Minor things that bother you

[kkt]

Legal tender laws mean that if you order first and then pay (and there's no way to back out of it), they must accept cash.

I'm not sure that's exactly what the legal tender laws mean.  If the customer is unable or unwilling to pay any way but cash, the restaurant might just take the food back and send the customer on their way.

[hotdogPi]

Legal tender laws mean that if you order first and then pay (and there's no way to back out of it), they must accept cash.

I'm not sure that's exactly what the legal tender laws mean.  If the customer is unable or unwilling to pay any way but cash, the restaurant might just take the food back and send the customer on their way.

Okay, that does seem to be a possibility, since unlike sit-down restaurants, you haven't eaten the food yet. I wasn't thinking of that.

[CtrlAltDel]

Legal tender laws mean that if you order first and then pay (and there's no way to back out of it), they must accept cash.

This is not true. Perhaps it should be, but it is not, except in various cities and states where specific legislation has passed.

[Scott5114]

Legal tender laws say that cash is to be accepted in payment of a debt unless it's been agreed by the parties that payment will be tendered in some other form. In the case of a sit-down restaurant, since you eat the food first and then pay, you owe the restaurant money (you have incurred a debt), and so they are obliged to accept cash...unless they inform you before you incur the debt that they will not (which could be in the form of a sign at the entrance, a note on the menu, or whatever).

Put another way, if they send you the check, it says $20, and you leave a $20 on the table and walk out, you are legally free and clear even if the manager is so angry about it he's eating his own necktie...so long as you didn't pass a sign informing you ahead of time that you couldn't do that.

But, yes, since the fast food model generally incurs getting the money up front, they are free to decline to accept your cash and then are not obliged to provide you anything in return.

[kkt]

I'd be interested in some citations about that.

When I bought a car, the dealer said No cash transactions.  Take your cash to a bank and get a cashier's check or money order.  Ditto for buying a house.  For that matter, when I pay my property taxes, there's no place to go plunk down a few thousand $ worth of greenbacks.  I can't even pay for a birth certificate or death certificate in cash.

[CtrlAltDel]

Legal tender laws say that cash is to be accepted in payment of a debt unless it's been agreed by the parties that payment will be tendered in some other form. In the case of a sit-down restaurant, since you eat the food first and then pay, you owe the restaurant money (you have incurred a debt), and so they are obliged to accept cash...unless they inform you before you incur the debt that they will not (which could be in the form of a sign at the entrance, a note on the menu, or whatever).

Do you have a legal citation for this? I know you have retail business experience, but my understanding has always been that the legal tender law is really really weak.

[Scott5114]

A lot of this is, I believe, derived from case law and not legal statute. There is quite a lot of case law on the subject from the 19th century when people were going back and forth on whether paper money was legal tender or not. Not being a lawyer, though, I'm not going to pore over it since I'm not getting paid to do so. So instead I'll do some lazy Googling and summarize it here.

The Fed says:

There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.

Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all U.S. money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.

The relevant technicality is "when tendered to a creditor"–the vast majority of the transactions you engage in on a daily basis are not resolving debts tendered to a creditor. Thus the legal tender laws do not apply.

As for the situations kkt mentions:
- "When I bought a car, the dealer said No cash transactions.  Take your cash to a bank and get a cashier's check or money order." –until the dealer gave you title to the car, you hadn't incurred a debt, so they were free to stipulate what tender they would accept
- "Ditto for buying a house." –ditto but s/car/house/ 
- "For that matter, when I pay my property taxes, there's no place to go plunk down a few thousand $ worth of greenbacks." –this is explicitly addressed by 31 USC 5103, so while the county assessor probably very very much does not want you to do this, you could probably force them to if you caused enough of a stink about it (thus how we get the periodic stories of some jackass paying their taxes in pennies)
- "I can't even pay for a birth certificate or death certificate in cash." –this is a little less cut and dried because it is a fee for a government service and not a tax, but I would imagine that if you wanted to stand your ground and pound on 31 USC 5103 at the clerk for a while, they might accept your cash to get you to go away. (This might qualify as a "public charge" depending on what case law says that phrase means, in which case they would be obliged to accept it.)

Cornell Law mentions the following interesting elaboration:

Although the original creditor who is owed money is not necessarily obligated to accept the tendered payment, the specific act of tendering the payment absolves the debt.

This makes it sound like if you have a debt, try to pay with a $100 bill, and the creditor rejects the payment, you now are free to keep the $100 and the debt is considered legally paid.

Of course many of these situations may lead to you getting sued (and the court presumably finding in your favor...eventually) and/or barred from doing business with the creditor ever again, meaning it'd be more of a pain the ass to take advantage of the legal tender laws than just writing a check or using your credit card or whatever.

[formulanone]

If a customer wants to buy a vehicle with cash; there's a certain limit (say, around $3000-5000) where anything over that amount requires cash reporting documentation. I'm not a finance wizard, but typically these documents require a bank account number, information on your employer, disclosing how much you earned and reported to the IRS in previous years, et cetera...or making reasonable explanations why this information doesn't exist. This is probably easier for the buy-here/pay-here stores which sell used vehicles, since there's no franchise dictating requirements and insurance policies. They're willing to take on a little more risk but also have a lot less overhead.

The difficulty is then safely taking large sums of money to a bank; if it's really large sums of cash, they are likely to work out a pick up with armored transport. Either that, or there's the risk of the low-level accounting clerk to decide to forgo work in the next...lifetime. After that, the burden of documentation falls primarily the buyer. While a dealership tends to store these legal docs for many years, the buyer is probably the one creating the larger fuss because they may not want to disclose information related to large sums of money they themselves couldn't have bothered taking to a bank in the first place. A dealership is out a lot of money, loses a vehicle over a shady transaction, and has to try to recover that vehicle, so they're not on the wrong side of their financial statement with their franchise. It's a tremendous headache with a ton of lost profit and regulation.

My understanding is that dispensaries also have problems in the reverse, and have to deal with large sums of cash because they can't accept much of anything else; credit card companies aren't legally allowed to deal with electronic credit transactions of any sort until the feds make it 50-state legal to do so.

I have not worked in a restaurant before, but I would imagine that they are one of the last places to stop accepting cash (except in cases where there were genuine shortages of coins and bills) since they prefer to perform business and pay their employees that form of currency, especially as the gratuity payments are on the hush-hush. Maybe the extreme end of the upscale places prefer to use credit cards, but I'd imagine that the other 99% is fine with cash transactions, though becoming less and less the case as convenience marches on.

[CtrlAltDel]

A lot of this is, I believe, derived from case law and not legal statute. There is quite a lot of case law on the subject from the 19th century when people were going back and forth on whether paper money was legal tender or not. Not being a lawyer, though, I'm not going to pore over it since I'm not getting paid to do so. So instead I'll do some lazy Googling and summarize it here.

The Fed says:

There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.

Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all U.S. money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.

Yeah, I found this myself, and it's really inconclusive. It essentially says two separate things while pretending to say one.

As far as case law goes, it's possible that there isn't all that much. To sue someone in federal court, there must be minimum damages of 75,000$, so it's imaginable that restaurant check situations have never been tested, leading nonjudges, such as ourselves, to try figure things out. Any larger comparable situations, as you've pointed out, seem have an out, such as the title not being transferred, and so on.

[1995hoo]

^^^^

The $75,000 amount-in-controversy requirement only applies to diversity jurisdiction. If you had a claim based on a federal statute or similar (known as federal-question jurisdiction), the $75,000 minimum wouldn't apply.

[CtrlAltDel]

^^^^

The $75,000 amount-in-controversy requirement only applies to diversity jurisdiction. If you had a claim based on a federal statute or similar (known as federal-question jurisdiction), the $75,000 minimum wouldn't apply.

Well, so much for that theory, then.

[Scott5114]

If a customer wants to buy a vehicle with cash; there's a certain limit (say, around $3000-5000) where anything over that amount requires cash reporting documentation. I'm not a finance wizard, but typically these documents require a bank account number, information on your employer, disclosing how much you earned and reported to the IRS in previous years, et cetera...or making reasonable explanations why this information doesn't exist.

Hey, what do you know, I have direct experience with that law. That's the Bank Secrecy Act, often referred to as Title 31. The limit set by the law under which the reporting requirements kick in is a combined $10,000 in one business day, although businesses can choose to create a policy to collect the information required to file the report at a lower threshold. (Casinos often begin collecting the information at a lower level–which varies from casino to casino–just in case the customer accumulates $10,000 across a number of smaller transactions.) BSA also requires reporting any attempts to avoid the reporting requirements, like by withdrawing $9,900 and then $100 the next day. (This was how former House Speaker Dennis Hastert went to jail. The bank had asked him about multiple withdrawals he'd been making of $50,000; thereafter, he changed the withdrawals to be less than the $10,000 reporting requirement. A bank employee flagged this as suspicious behavior and alerted the Treasury Department. Come to find out he'd been using the cash as hush money to pay off someone he'd sexually abused, and intended to pull out $3.5 million altogether.)

The reporting requirements are not quite as onerous as you state; mostly it's name/physical address/social security number, date of birth, method of ID verification (e.g. driver license number), and line of work the customer is in (needless to say if someone is, say, a clerk at a shoe store and they're showing up with $20,000 in cash, that is going to be very interesting to the feds). That all goes in the Currency Transaction Report (FinCEN form 104) that gets passed off to the Treasury Department (and they can then pull IRS records as needed for any investigation, of course).

BSA compliance is not really what I'd call hard, especially since the customer would expect a car dealer to collect much of the information needed anyway. But fucking up carries some pretty big risks; the Treasury Department has the right to slap both the business and the individual employees involved with some pretty hefty fines. So it's no wonder that a business that regularly does transactions over $10,000 would want to avoid the risk by insisting a customer use more traceable financial instruments that don't require the paperwork overhead.

[Max Rockatansky]

Regarding cash purchases at $10,000 or higher most reputable businesses usually will have you covered for all the paperwork required to report under the provisions of the BSA.  I've never really found it to be something that has held me up the handful of times I've made purchases in excess of 10K.

[Scott5114]

Beyond the reporting requirements, there's also the problem that $10,000 in cash is actually pretty cumbersome to deal with. Because the biggest denomination printed today is only $100, you need 100 bills. That takes a fair while to count unless you have a money counting machine. It definitely looks like a lot more money than it actually is.



If I was ever in the position where I got to choose, I probably wouldn't want to deal with anything more than about $4,000 or so in cash. That's about the point where I start getting bored of counting.

[1995hoo]

^^^^

About 30 years ago I worked at Micro Center in Fairfax, Virginia, and someone paid $4600 cash for a laptop. That was a pain in the arse counting out all those $100 bills on the checkout counter and then getting a "cash pull" ASAP so all that money wouldn't be in the register, given that other customers had seen the money being counted.

[kphoger]

What counts as "cash" when it comes to reporting purposes?  I mean, I once bought a used car for $10,000 and wrote the dealer a personal check.  No income or employment information or verification required.

[kphoger]

the vast majority of the transactions you engage in on a daily basis are not resolving debts tendered to a creditor. Thus the legal tender laws do not apply.

As far as case law goes, it's possible that there isn't all that much ... it's imaginable that restaurant check situations have never been tested, leading nonjudges, such as ourselves, to try figure things out.

This has long been my suspicion.  I've read lawyers' and others' opinions and interpretations that state a sit-down restaurant is legally obligated to accept cash as payment, so long as payment is required after dining rather than before.  However, I don't recall ever having seen an actual legal case that decided that.

Our cash got its 'legal tender for all debts' tagline back when there was risk of businesses accepting foreign currency while refusing US dollars.  It was added to our money in an age when people were buying goods and property with Spanish silver, not in an age when people were accidentally leaving their Discover card at home before heading to Applebee's–and it's therefore conceivable to me that a court would decide a business must accept US dollars, but that those dollars could be electronic just as well as paper notes.

[abefroman329]

What counts as "cash" when it comes to reporting purposes?  I mean, I once bought a used car for $10,000 and wrote the dealer a personal check.  No income or employment information or verification required.

Just cash.  The concern in this case would be that the purchase of the car is the means to an end of laundering money.  A personal check is a paper trail; cash is not.

[Scott5114]

What counts as "cash" when it comes to reporting purposes?  I mean, I once bought a used car for $10,000 and wrote the dealer a personal check.  No income or employment information or verification required.

Just cash.  The concern in this case would be that the purchase of the car is the means to an end of laundering money.  A personal check is a paper trail; cash is not.

Right. Cash or cash equivalents are all that go on a Currency Transaction Report. (Casino chips count as cash, for instance.) A check goes on a Monetary Instrument Log, which has totally different requirements (and I think that's only for when you exchange a check for cash or vice-versa, e.g. if you buy a cashier's check).

[abefroman329]

What counts as "cash" when it comes to reporting purposes?  I mean, I once bought a used car for $10,000 and wrote the dealer a personal check.  No income or employment information or verification required.

Just cash.  The concern in this case would be that the purchase of the car is the means to an end of laundering money.  A personal check is a paper trail; cash is not.

Right. Cash or cash equivalents are all that go on a Currency Transaction Report. (Casino chips count as cash, for instance.) A check goes on a Monetary Instrument Log, which has totally different requirements (and I think that's only for when you exchange a check for cash or vice-versa, e.g. if you buy a cashier's check).

Out of curiosity, will your casino accept chips from another casino, and if they don't now, did they ever do that at one time?

[Scott5114]

What counts as "cash" when it comes to reporting purposes?  I mean, I once bought a used car for $10,000 and wrote the dealer a personal check.  No income or employment information or verification required.

Just cash.  The concern in this case would be that the purchase of the car is the means to an end of laundering money.  A personal check is a paper trail; cash is not.

Right. Cash or cash equivalents are all that go on a Currency Transaction Report. (Casino chips count as cash, for instance.) A check goes on a Monetary Instrument Log, which has totally different requirements (and I think that's only for when you exchange a check for cash or vice-versa, e.g. if you buy a cashier's check).

Out of curiosity, will your casino accept chips from another casino, and if they don't now, did they ever do that at one time?

Not on purpose, because chips are essentially a bearer instrument backed by each individual casino. So accepting chips from "Casino R" would mess up the books at "Casino N", even though they were both owned by "Tribe C". (And it would mess things up even more if they were to accept chips from "Casino F" that was run by "Tribe P".)

There was a protocol for what happened if a foreign chip was accepted by mistake, though. Basically they would wait until enough chips from a certain casino amassed in the vault, and then send a member of management over there to cash them out at the cage like any other customer.

[US71]

seeing 20 people post the same Mene on Fakebook, 

[Scott5114]

When you take the seatbelt off and it doesn't retract, so when you close the car door it just clangs off the seatbelt buckle and bounces back open.

[formulanone]

^^^^

About 30 years ago I worked at Micro Center in Fairfax, Virginia, and someone paid $4600 cash for a laptop. That was a pain in the arse counting out all those $100 bills on the checkout counter and then getting a "cash pull" ASAP so all that money wouldn't be in the register, given that other customers had seen the money being counted.

Every time I think that spending $1500-2000 on a computer is a little too much, I fall back on those times when it was at least twice as much for double the physical space and a mere fragment of the overall abilities of today's computer.

[Scott5114]

And of course $4600 was a lot more money in 1992 than it is today. (The Minneapolis Fed says $4600 in 1992 = $9651.77 today.)