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I like how Visa/Master Card are shutting “indecent” games down, but have no fucking issues with twitter generating CSAM.
It’s never an issue when the criminal is rich.
It’s a crime if you’re poor and a fine if you’re rich and all’at.
Well this means that there is still a payment provider doing the barcode system. This payment provider could still block certain vendors. It works excellently to protect the privacy of the buyer, though.
Visa/MasterCard is a tax in every transaction. You might not see it but it is there.
Here in Czechia you can pay for online transactions with instant direct bank transfer, so cards are not really needed. This is often used for direct transfers between individuals where one generates a QR code on his phone and the other scans it.
it was very confusing when I was given a qr code as an option to pay on a restaurant in Czechia 😂
That’s because Europe has SEPA, which are used in the EU.
Europeans mind can’t comprehend the issues of american banks.
They are so bad, it doesn’t make any sense.
SEPA pertains only to EUR, Czechia uses CZK
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No.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
SEPA not only includes non-Euro countries, it also includes non-EU countries.
EUR is a symbol for Euro currency. I could have made that clear.
That changes nothing.
How are you going to use it to transfer CZK?
Have you never used it?
Or cheched out the link?
Wtf
Europeans mind can’t comprehend the issues of american banks.
Still need an American credit card to rent a car tho
No you don’t? What are you talking about?
Car rentals almost exclusively accept payment by credit card, unless you have a corporate account that is billed periodically.
I’m sure you can find an exception but please let’s not fly off to nitpick land.
I’ve literally rented cars in Greece using cash.
They do require some form of identification for obvious reasons, but that is about it.
None of the rental places required credit cards.
My parents are not from the USA and don’t have USA bank accounts or credit cards and have had no problems renting a car in Europe or anywhere else they went. I really don’t get what you mean. I don’t see why you specifically need an American card and not just a credit card from any modern country.
I mean if you don’t understand things you should ask, not assume others are in the wrong. Yeah it would be pretty stupid to be forced to have US accounts to rent cars in Europe, luckily we’re not THAT stupid.
VISA and MasterCard are practically a monopoly on credit card circuits, your parents’ cards may be issued by a local bank but there’s a 95% chance they’ve got one of these two companies’ logo printed on them, and out of every payment they make, these AMERICAN companies get 2% (blah blah cashback, blah blah terms and conditions), because they are made on their circuits!
You may also have debit cards that DON’T have those logos, but debit cards can’t be used for car rentals.I did ask. Specifically I asked what you were talking about. All you really had to say was Visa and MasterCard are USA companies that handle card transactions. If you had clarified that initially you wouldn’t be getting downvoted to hell.
I think you are making too sweeping of a statement here. Maybe this is the case for car rentals you encounter / have access to but the response should show that’s not the case everywhere in the EU. I rented a car without a credit card over 5 years ago where I’m from. You do pay a deposit that I suppose a credit card would normally insure for, but the option exists. Either way, if a car rental requires a credit card, I would not even consider renting with them. That’s ridiculous.
Look, if you go to mom and pop’s car rental, sure, they can accept hens as payment if they like. If you use car rentals the most common way, as a supplement for airport travel, you rent one in your city, you use it to go to the airport, return it, fly to your destination, rent another car at the airport, do your things, go back, repeat. At those locations you’ll only have the big names, AVIS, Hertz, Europcar… Those are mostly credit-card or corporate account exclusive. And corporate accounts are expensive, at my former company we had a bunch of people travelling constantly and it still wasn’t economically advantageous, apparently.
Also, you are just wrong about the big names you mentioned:
spoiler
Debit Cards – Accepted in many countries, but restrictions apply (see below)
In some countries, only credit cards are accepted—unless you’ve prepaid online with a debit card. If you prepaid your rental with a debit card, you must bring the same card to the counter, along with a valid credit card for the deposit. Your card must be in the name of the main driver, and valid for the entire duration of the rental.
Mini and Economy class; debit or credit card;
FVMR; debit or credit card;
Passenger van (9 pers.); debit or credit card;
Van; cash, debit card, or credit card;
Your debit card is now welcome at Hertz in Europe. Here at Hertz we like to make renting a car personal. You decide what to drive and where to drive, and now you can choose how to pay.
We welcome debit cards across our European locations. We want your journey with us to be easy, so giving you options on how to pay puts you in the driving seat. No complicated processes – a simple deposit that works the same for credit cards as debit cards. Go your own way. Pay your own way.
You never said your statement was just about airport car rentals. Over here that is very likely not the most common usage of rentals (and certainly if you exclude business travel and holidays), since airports are far between, but car rentals are all over the place, far away from those airports. You rent cars over here if you dont own a car and need transportation. Or if you have to move a large amount of items you rent a van.
Besides, you can simply take the bus or train from any airport to a real car rental which should be close by in any major city. Of course if you go do it in a business hub you will find scams for the average person. Does that sacrifice a little bit of convenience, sure. But if you buy all your water from street vendors at a tourist attraction we dont claim water is expensive.
I can see you are simply from a very different world, that of business travel, which is why your perspective is so different.
EDIT: And no, I didn’t use a mom and pop shop, I used the biggest car renter in my country (Netherlands) with over 130 locations.
If you have an account in any European bank, you can pay by bank transfer or SEPA in basically any European business, and often it’s their favourite way to do it because there is no commission. I don’t know country by country, but in Germany the standard for payment system is Girocard which is German payment processing, and the cards usually come equipped with both it and some American standard like visa and mastercard, but a lot of people opt out, if they don’t care about payment outside of Europe.
Any car rental worth it’s salt in Europe will accept some form of SEPA, but also, renting a car is not an essential part of people’s lives here, so it’s not even something people care about that muchbut also, renting a car is not an essential part of people’s lives here
It may not be part of your life, but I’ve done it hundreds of time as a travelling tech (plus a few as a tourist), and I’ve had times when airports with hundreds/thousands of rental cars had trouble satisfying demand, so it seems there are others with the same need.
And no, they don’t accept SEPA, although terms vary by country, and if they do they require a safety deposit that can go from a few hundred euros to the thousands, not exactly practical.
Being traveling tech is absolutely not usual occupancy, so it doesn’t change what I said. But if you work in Europe and traveling around, and moving around instruments is part of your job, you should have a company card anyway for it, so again, it doesn’t really matter for the rest of Europeans.
What I’m trying to convey, that even though you will have some incompetence without American run banking systems, unless you’re in a very specific operation, like needing to rent a car at an airport for example, you wouldn’t be severely inconvenient.
I’m saying it as a refugee from a country that (for justifiable reasons) is getting some negativity around, and being born there I’m deemed not actually a good person in advance, and it took me a lot of time to convince various governments that I’m not a dangerous exemplar of my race. The time I spent without access to international banking systems like Visa weren’t debilitating, even though inconvenient at times.How is a deposit not practical? Unless they require it in cash that has to then at the end be picked up at the pickup point (which would be crazy)? A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license. It’s the same reason they don’t typically rent to people below 25 (or without a higher deposit).
It’s really only unpractical if you don’t have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars? Otherwise you just pay a bit more the first time and then get that money deposited back on your account when you return the car. There’s basically no difference in the end other than a bigger number the first time, and if you wreck the car or something, you will lose the deposit through your credit card too.
I still don’t know why USians don’t simply use bank transfers. Uses neither cash nor credit cards, perfectly easy.
Our banks make it a pain in the ass and I don’t know any stores that would accept it
Bank transfers here take 3 days typically. And that’s business days, so add another one if it’s after 4:30 pm, also Saturday, Sunday, and holidays don’t count.
That’s what it was like here not so long ago. It can occasionally still take that long if you’re sending money to another bank. Same for weekends and holidays. We still seem to get by just fine?
Banks and other financial institutions invest our money during the float (the period of time between deposit and the money showing up in the account).
No. In Sweden, 99% of all payments are cahsless. Most stores don’t even take cash anymore.
We still have plenty of (digital) options for payment in addition to Visa/Mastercard.
In my view, it’s actually the opposite. The more digital paymenst are used, the higher the incentive to create a competing payment solution. Swish and Klarna are taking over more and more here.
The destruction of cash in the EU is jusy disgusting. I dont want to have to leave a paper trail for everything.
Could be an alibi if you ever get in major trouble, lookup the transaction, match to security footage, prove you weren’t there.
I don’t have to prove I wasn’t there. They have to prove I was.
So if someone is lying and says you were? Mistaken identity? Easy fix if you show you weren’t where the crime took place.
You have a lot of trust in “the system”.
I thought klarna was just a payday loan basically?
It’s mostly a middle man to outsource payments. The stire doesn’t care if it’s on credit or not. You can pay directly with a bank account through Klarna, at least with the major Swedish banks.
Oh, I never looked into it. Just thought it was one of those high interest “loans” and said fuck no.
Recently visited a country where cash is very much preferred and it was such a breath of fresh air. I thought it would be annoying to have to keep up with the spare change and what not but it was fine and actually felt pretty good. I’ve since started using cash a lot more at home.
I recently had a trip to Japan and had more mixed opinions about it. Mainly because they have a large variety of coins and oh boy do you end up with a lot of them.
Coinage is the single reason why I’m tipped over the edge to prefer card. I HATE dealing with change.
I wish there was a card that was closer to cash where the money is stored on the physical card not offsite but that seems like a nightmare in itself… Idk
debit card?
That’s what I mean when I say card generally. Doesn’t really help using debit instead of credit. If anything it’s worse because if you get your money stolen you bank doesn’t give a damn, whereas they will send a swat team if you use a credit card.
But both identify you just the same afaik…
oh, so you would just want a card associated with a bank account that is anonymous?
I guess it could be nice, yea? I know of things like Monero and such but I never dove in.
I wish I could pay in cash for online purchases from Amazon. Amazon has such a privacy nightmare that I cannot even hide or delete my purchase history. I know deleting the history doesn’t remove the trait or nullify anything, but the fact that it remains visible on your account is stupid. There are purchases that I dont want anyone looking at my account to know and sometimes I just like clearing it. I don’t care for shit I bought back in 2018 anymore.
Alternate account?
I consulted for a luxury brand on e-commerce for a bit and I was surprised how important credit card splitting was to their American business.
Like, people splitting a purchase across multiple cards because they were so close to the max for each.
I questioned how much time we were spending on it but they assured me it was a common use case.
Note I recently had to do some gymnastics to split a purchase over ‘credit cards’ because I had received a few modest gift cards. I suspect that’s an even more common case, since people want to completely use up a received gift card and that’s all but impossible without splitting. Even if I have 10s of thousands of available limit, a gift card means I’m trying to spend like $50 or $100 out of a card.
I HATE gift cards. Kiddo got one for Nintendo. We have a hacked switch! Can’t even use it.
Have a Home Depot one that says “invalid” or whatever wording, won’t let me use it.
Basically buying a piece of plastic, they take your money and tell you to fuck off. No one’s going to take them to court for $50, so it’s win-win all around for them.
I did this ONCE on a $10k required purchase. Never again.
Interesting, usually when I get into something that expensive, they don’t even want to accept credit cards. I think most I got someone to take as a credit card transaction was about $6,000. They’ll only take check or certified check, or if a car then of course they really want you to borrow through whatever they have partnered with.
unfortunately, was for a lawyer. paid it off in two months, but didn’t quite have $10k i cash in my pocket. it wasn’t for a DUI, i don’t drink lmao. thats the most common reason for lawyers i’ve heard.
