This is a common misconception around the definition of legal tender.
A shop is perfectly within their rights to refuse to sell you something if you are not willing to use their accepted payment methods.
Legal tender simply means they can't sue you if you offer to settle their debt using a legal tender currency. If they have refused to sell you the item, there is no debt, therefore no obligation to accept any particular instrument
While that may be legally the case right now, the EU explicitly intends to limit this practice. E.g. in the proposal on the legal tender of cash published last year by the Commission [0], which will also apply to the digital euro, it mandates:
"To ensure the effectiveness of the legal tender of cash, this Regulation applies also to ex ante unilateral exclusion of payments in cash and to the access to cash", where ex ante unilateral exclusion of payments is defined as "a situation when a retailer or service provider unilaterally excludes cash as a payment method for example by introducing a ‘no cash’ sign. In this case, the payer and payee do not freely agree to a means of payment for a purchase;"
In Article 7, the regulation requires that member states monitor this practice and, if it undermines the intention of the legal tender (i.e. merchants must sell you goods for cash), they shall apply "remedial measures".
Also:
IANAL, but at least in Germany, implied-in-fact contracts render the contract of purchase "signed" the moment you receive the good over the counter from the merchant. If you haven't payed by then, you are in debt to the merchant and from what I would say, the legal tender rules apply.
If it allows someone to avoid an unjustified $250,000 loss each time … I hope they come here every time!
EXCEPT, what I really wish is that large companies like STRIPE stopped treating gross account mismanagement cases as small frequency regrettable but acceptable outcomes.
How can any of us sleep at night with these deaf capricious overlords managing our important information & services?
It is getting dystopian. Welcome to Brazil (the movie).
It‘s interesting for HN because on this site are many potential customers. I have a finished Stripe integration in addition to app store sales but at this point I might need alternatives
The audience of HN is also the audience who will pick what payment provider they want for their new projects. Horror stories like this one are relevant to this audience (and why they get upvoted).
I agree with the OP. Nobody should be choosing a critical dependency based on anecdotes like this, which tell only one side. If there were a post that aggregated such anecdotes with a more neutral stance, that might be more interesting.
That is true, but we have heard many of these stories that could only be resolved by using HN. How many more stories are there, that we don't here about because the affected people don't know HN? At some point it becomes a pattern.
It doesn’t matter that it is anecdotal in plenty of these HN support cases, the fact that this is possible at all is commonly what is atrocious (in other words, this should happen zero times). IE You can’t deflect a nuclear plant meltdown by saying we need to know how long it was running fine beforehand.
I'm also not fond of using HN for this sort of thing, but for a non-bootstrapped business, 250k isn't peanuts.
As much as this is a request for acutal support from Stripe, I also do hope that readers who are in a business of taking online payments will become fully aware of the risk of using Stripe, since I weren't (and now I'm in a situation of possibly losing 250k).
Well the Stripe founders read HN and still don’t care about getting their shit together. And I’m glad I keep seeing these—I have a client that wanted to add Stripe to their checkout and I’ll now be recommending against it.
People should be encouraged to share these types of stories so we can hold these companies to account. Tiresome? Please refer to Tyler, the Creator's famous tweet if these posts are bothering you.
If you can suggest a better way to reach an actual human at Stripe / Google / etc, I’m all ears.
Sometimes you get lucky and reach a helpdesk droid, but they’re not permitted to deviate from script. Posting to HN can put you in contact with someone who actually is able to do independent thinking, and take action too
As technologists we should bare witness to the consequences our way work has in the world and seek to blunt them. You can personally opt out by ignoring these stories.
He even talked about it in his book Accidental Superpower nearly 10 years ago. His writings/videos have been instrumental in helping me to make some sense of what's going on in Ukraine
The author mentioned, and the only one I know of, is buying directly from the publishers.
Problem is: those are ridiculously expensive, like 35 euros for a single audio book that I don't even know if I'll like the contents because you can't browse it. Physical books are usually 15 euros and then you have unit and shipping costs. Somehow the publisher is fine putting it on audible (where I pay €10) and getting a few percent of that, but not fine if I pay "only" 10 euros when buying from them directly?
No idea about the logic here. I'd also be fine to pay 15 or so, matching the physical book, bit of a premium not to have to enrich Amazon. But 35 as only alternative to 10? Yeah no.
Edit: thought I should back this up with numbers. The first book that came to mind was Ready Player 2, I didn't cherry pick here it's literally the very first that I thought of and checked. Amazon ranked way higher than the official site but I got there via the author's Wikipedia page. From there there are links to three stores: one sells just the paper version, two stores both sell
- The paper book for $13
- The audio CDs for $44
- It's available on Audible.de for €10
This author (publisher?) is clearly not interested in getting sales via means other than Audible and must be happy with their €1.30 that the author says they get for non-exclusivity, or even if "audiblegate" is fake and they get the "full" 25%, that's still €2.50 instead of $44.
It's the same with Steam. I don't play new games that often, but when I do, I look to buy directly from the authors, DRM-free, the whole jazz. Often it's simply not possible and the only purchase option is via Steam. Next thing I hear is my game dev friend complaining about Steam dominance. I'm trying, but they need to make it possible at all... (Or in audio books' case, make it somewhat reasonable)
But they can't get the higher percentage because there is technically another sales avenue, so it's not exclusive, even if barely a soul would make use of it.
I use hledger-flow [1]. It's an opinionated way of importing csvs into the hledger format. Works really well for me, just export the csvs, write a mapping and you are good to go.
It supports preprocessing the csvs if you need to clean the data or compute some new fields which is really powerful. Once you are up and running it only needs some minor updates each month to map unidentifiable transactions I can do this in under an hour these days.
The Financial Times is my main news source. It seems to be the only one that I've found which doesn't have sensationalist stories/click baity headlines
Financial journalism really outperforms most media sources in terms of picking important stories and telling them in an unbiased way.
Maybe their wealthier audience means that they're not racing to the bottom for clicks. Maybe the people in charge know to run a business that gives people what they want without alienating half of potential customers. Maybe something else entirely. Whatever it is, it's working, and I hope it stays that way.
A shop is perfectly within their rights to refuse to sell you something if you are not willing to use their accepted payment methods.
Legal tender simply means they can't sue you if you offer to settle their debt using a legal tender currency. If they have refused to sell you the item, there is no debt, therefore no obligation to accept any particular instrument
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-is-legal-ten...