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.

  • sudokuEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    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?

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      33·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • sudokuEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        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%.

        • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          32·
          4 months ago

          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.