cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11819804
The trend in western Europe is banks are pulling out of the ATM business and joining consortiums. Then those consortiums deploy much fewer ATMs than the banks had. And they monopolise. If one or two ATM brands reject your card, you may be fucked if it’s a small city, as I recently experienced.
ATM alternatives are becoming increasingly essential due to ATM enshitification & sparcity. Some shops give cash back, where you have more money pulled from your bank and the cashier gives you cash from the register. The US has always been on-the-ball with cash back, even though the ATMs in the US are not the shit-show that we see in Europe lately.
So it’s easy to find cash back options in the US because there are several compiled lists showing various stores and limits, like this. Some shops have a fee and some not and the range of limits vary wildly. But at least there are published options.
I’m struggling to find information like that in Europe. In part this is because “cash back” is an overloaded term that also means rebate deals (like discounts of ~1—5%), so search results are polluted. It’s bizarre there is so little info about this. So many people have become cashless that hardly anyone even notices the shit show that ATMs have become. Hence low demand for info on cash back options.
Cash back can be interesting for foreign card holders in Europe because they avoid ATM fees. Discovercard/Diner’s Club seems to guarantee no cash back fee and at the same time no currency exchange markup. But the data on cashback in Europe is sparse and inconsistent from one country to the next.
- Norway shops offering cash back refuse non-Norwegian cards.
- UK stores require no purchase and have no fee, but they also discriminate against non-local bank cards.
- Denmark: local cards only, credit cards refused.
- Spain: no cash back service (but that article is 10 yrs old).
- Netherlands: rumour is that Albert Heijn, SPAR, and Smullers have cash back. (SPAR advertises cashback on their UK site with a locator because apparently only some locations offer it. Yet they wholly conceal this option from their Dutch website)
- Belgium: Aldi has it. But if you boycott Israel then you boycott Aldi North (all Belgian Aldis are Aldi North)
Mastercard has a “cashback store locator” on their US website. And apparently that db is only populated with US stores. Which is a bit shitty because MC is global and they should have that information.
I’m not getting why shops are non-transparent about this. Presumably they offer cash back potentially fee-free because they profit from whatever you’re buying. It would work on me… if I have some confidence that I can get €200 cash back at a store, that store is sure to get my business.
Anyway, please feel free to use this thread to crowdsource cashback info.
Why shouldn’t I just pay with card and avoid all of this? Even food stands on the street accept cards nowadays.
This is a must-read. Someone’s alcohol consumption was tracked through his card purchases and then used against him to deny him a mortgage. So it would be foolish to use a card to buy:
Apart from that, there is a war on cash, which is a war on privacy. When you pay by card, you are part of the problem. You serve as an enabler for shops to refuse cash. It’s important to use cash for everything now to signal its importance to merchants considering eliminating it as an option. Once cash is gone, banks have full power over you. All consumers will be wholly disempowered.
Even though I have a card, if a shop refuses cash I usually refuse to patronise the shop so as not to support the social irresponsibility of their exclusivity and the forced-banking consequence they are pushing.
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The source is the article I linked. I would love to see the author to get that story published by a credible publisher because that story really needs widespread exposure.
It likely was the US. And if that same US card holder were to do their alcohol consumption in the EU, I would like to see them return home and demand their GDPR right to have that information not leaked all over the place and abused. Such an attempt would be laughable.
Even inside the EU, GDPR enforcement is a bit of a shit show. It’s not something you can rely on. I’ve reported dozens of blatant GDPR violations that are simple, stark, with solid evidence and would be trivially easy to enforce yet they just get moth balled. They enforce a few token cases to make it look like the GDPR is working well. I’ve seen enough to know it’s a terrible idea to rely on the GDPR. Especially with banks. Data protection authorities are turning a blind eye to banks. They are scared of them for some reason. It’s good that the GDPR is at least in place, but a bit of street wisdom is still absolutely essential in the EU.
Even in some hypothetical utopia where the GDPR is thoroughly enforced and adhered to, there is nothing in that GDPR to empower consumers who are disempowered by forced banking. It would take one hell of a brilliant lawyer to effectively argue that cash elimination violates the data minimisation principle. If a bank decides they don’t want you donating to Wikileaks, or that they want to freeze your account because your ID card expired, that is entirely outside the purview of GDPR rules.
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That comment is the source. It is now your job (if you choose to accept it), to chase that up, ask the source for their source, and investigate until you are satisfied. Or give up. You have the source to do what you want with it. But you can’t reasonably claim the source was not given.
I’m not going to do an investigation for you. Do your own homework. You are the sole judge for the standard of evidence you seek. I could not act your behalf even if I wanted to.
The GDPR covers EU citizens worldwide and also everyone in Europe regardless of citizenship (expats and even 1-day tourists passing through). That doesn’t mean you have a functional enforcement infrastructure when shit falls apart. The system isn’t even fully operational inside the EU for EU citizens facing EU companies. Enforcement is a shit show. Absolutely laughable to think someone can return to the US and demand GDPR protection on their EU transactions. It’s technically covered but there is no long-arm jurisdiction that would effectively lead to a fine on a US bank. No teeth. These rules are just for show. The EU has rubber-stamped the US as “adequate” w.r.t the GDPR likely for political reasons / trade relations, but it’s a joke. It would be naive to put stock in that.
(edit) What do you even expect to happen in this bizarre fantasy where you think you have all the benefits the GDPR attempts/pretends to deliver? That a US card holder would call their US bank and say “delete those transactions where I was drinking at a bar in the EU”? Even wholly within Europe, the bank has a legal obligation to retain that data. You cannot willy nilly make an art.17 req. and expect satisfaction of your demand. Your art.17 request to delete your speeding ticket will just be laughed at. With banking transactions you have an expectation that EU banks keep that data but does not needlessly share it. Try demanding a non-EU bank tag all your EU transactions and block them from sharing. Your demand will be laughed at (despite being technically valid). Then to come into this forum and tell people they can rely on non-EU banks not sharing EU-based transactions is perversely reckless.
I really hope no one would actually believe your bullshit. It’s dangerous to mislead people to think they have privacy safeguards they can rely on when they do not.
Nonsense. Forget the news, they just sensationalise the fine amounts. Have a look at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ to get the real data. Look at the fines per month stats. It’s at the bottom of the stats page. An embarrassment.
The EDPB published the average times from submission to fine per member state last year. When i say all the violations have been mothballed, it means they have sat more than double the average processing time. They sat for years – so long that the benefit of action has diminished and unrecovered damage is history.
That is not a test of GDPR enforcement. That is simply data controllers complying voluntarily.
A data controller sought out my sensitive personal data without my consent, collected it from another data controller who distributed it without my consent, used that info to send even more sensitive info outside the EU to a surveillance advertiser, and neither of them informed me of the collection and processing. When I discovered it, the acquiring data controller ignored my repeated article 17 requests. This is the most perverse abuse you can have in the right to erasure category. Then the DPA mothballed what was an easy open-shut case.
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That’s not what I said. Read your own quote. Sensational penalty figures are irrelevant. I gave you the source of the raw unadulterated data with stats. If you want to ignore that and have the media tell you what they think you should find relevant, you are free to do so. But this is why you are misinformed about GDPR enforcement. That, and your anecdotal experience which does not even test GDPR enforcement.
Ah, someone hasn’t been to Germany/Austria/parts of France.
Fees. Hidden as fuck.
I pay 50 cents a month for my account and debit card. the only additional fees are when changing currency, which happens when you change cash into different currency too. so what’s the problem?
Different people pay different fees. Even “basic” accounts are non-free in Europe. But I believe what daddy32 has in mind is the extortionate ~3-5% fee charged to the merchants by the card networks. Consumers are oblivious to that but they pay it one way or another. The visa/mc merchant agreements also bar merchants from surcharging card payers, which further conceals the fee. So the cost gets factored in. The only practical way to escape it is for the merchant to be a cash-only shop. Which btw was just banned in Belgium. Shops are now /forced/ to accept electronic payment and effectively pass on all those fees to all consumers.
By paying in cash, you at least reduce the fees the merchant pays on your transaction, which helps all consumers. When you pay by card, you effectively force other consumers to subsidise the fees you generate.
I absolutely agree that card companies charge fees which are bad for the consumers, however the actual fee is a lot lower than that, in my country it’s 0,8-0,9%.
Oh, right I forgot the EU controls that. The EU limits those fees by law. Outside the EU the free market yields fees of ~3—5%. It’s still a shit show of cash payers subsidising card payers in the end, helping the consumers who reduce our privacy by supporting the war on cash.