Clankers found me one study [1] that suggests total handling costs may actually be this bad, but are highly business dependent e.g. restaurants are worse than grocery stores
I'm just seeing what looks like an attempt to sell me a PDF.
What actually is the source of such costs? The cashier still has to be paid even if the customer is using a card. Presumably there isn't anywhere near that much theft from registers, or people messing up giving change?
Employee theft. Store manager theft. Robberies. Counterfeits. The extra time spent at each cash transaction and re-counting at the end of the day. Going to the bank, or paying an armored car service. Banks charge merchants a percentage of each cash deposit. Buying safes and pointing cameras down at each register.
This. My extended familys shop really benefitted from moving away from cash. Now the only source of cash is people who are paying from their black money stashes.
Cash handling costs is a real issue though. Not counting under-reporting income, credit cards cost the most at US intercharge levels of 1-3%. Then the all-in cost of cash handling. The lowest cost method is debit.
The lowest cost is in the EU in this regard. Anti-rent-seeking regulations ain't so bad for everyone, save the rent-seekers.
BTW, I used to handle around $7M/year in credit card transaction in the USA, and if you got actual hand-written partial numbers on a signed contract, then we could avoid nearly 100% of charge backs, as we always delivered on our end. I think in 14 years, we had around 10 charge back attempts, and our merchant provider loved us. The only time I ever magically lost a charge back was to a Visa executive for ~$10k, and our merchant provider just shrugged. Whatayagonnado?
It's the kind of feature that would rub people the wrong way, whether it's a cop, a friend, or a stranger you want to show a funny video to.
To give a couple of examples, using this would be a bit like locking the glove box in front of traffic cops, or going around the house locking rooms when you have a guest.
The only way to make it socially acceptable would be to make it some sort of default (for example, requiring face id when switching apps, with pin/fingerprint as a backup), which will probably be an option as the lag and failure rate of face id or other owner-detection technologies improve.
> To give a couple of examples, using this would be a bit like locking the glove box in front of traffic cops, or going around the house locking rooms when you have a guest.
That's a good point. Doing this basically says "I distrust you", which you probably don't want to say. (At least I don't.)
In the case of cops there's basically no way to interact with them that's both safe and makes them happy. But I just keep a printed version of my insurance for that reason.
Deepseek is, with difference, the most "Western" of Chinese models, so it's a bit perplexing that it was chosen to test this hypothesis.
I didn't run any benchmarks but I played around a little, and after getting around the API-level filter Deepseek V4's answers about "China-sensitive content" aren't any different from what I get from Claude and ChatGPT.
Most scams in China are a mix of romance and investment scams.
Since WeChat allows accounts created outside of China, it's these accounts that are used. And it's why there are times it's a pain to create a WeChat account outside of China.
The financial transactions all take place outside of WeChat.
Where did you get this number from?
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