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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Every time you swipe your credit card innumerable processes and algorithms begin to parse and reevaluate your personality profile. Every purchase you make changes their opinion and assessment of your shopping habits and needs.

Google may start showing ads for pet food if you bought something at PetSmart. Your bank may start sending you car loan ads if you spend at the repair shop. Everything has a side effect.

Cash is great because it is very simple. I gave you money for product, no one knows anything else. Sometimes it’s nice not to be data mined for buying a cup of coffee.

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Yeah, but I get paid for that in a combination of cash back and points.

I limit my credit card information sharing as much as the privacy preferences allow, but I'm not about to give up hundreds or thousands of dollars a year in value because Google might show me an ad I won't click on anyway.

I had the same concern and tracked it. In my family’s case, making cash our primary spending vehicle reduced our 2018 spending 7% vs 2017 when we were card focused.

The value of the credit card point is about 2% best case. Points exist to create a fomo attachment to the card.

Was this because of using cash or simply paying more attention to spending?

I’d love to see a well done research paper to get a sense of the expected value of cash vs credit.

Not the commenter but I had the same experience changing from debit card to credit card. Even though I always paid off everything at the end of the month, I'm now buying more things simply because it's so easy.

Before I only had smaller amounts on my debit card, so if I wanted to buy stuff online I had to first move money from another account. This extra step made me more conscious of my spending and I would imagine starting to use cash would have a similar effect.

It's pretty obvious and well known that if you disassociate the cost of something from the actual monetary value, people find it harder to conflate the two.

This is the reason that you didn't buy a $20 XBox game, you brought a game with 1,700 Microsoft points.

You don't buy this skin for a game for $14, that's way too expensive! Who would pay that! However when it's on sale for 3,200 Riot points? That's a great deal!

If you wanted to strike a death blow to the micropayments industry you'd just need to force them to put the actual monetary price against each loot box/gem bundle/whatever rather than obscuring it with a made up currency that nobody can evaluate cost against.

Credit card gets settled monthly. I may see something and say, “Cool, I’ll grab that” and swipe away.

With cash I check my wallet, and think “that’s $50, I have $300, and need to go shopping and get gas later”.

Just the act of reconciling what I have on hand defers many purchases. And deferrals stop many from happening!

That said, I’m not a caveman and have a credit card. I just don’t use it without planning or having an emergency/unplanned event.

Why did you spend less?

My guess is that it reduced impulse purchases because it creates for the 'giving money for x' moment a much more visual experience.

I only care about meeting the bonus spend requirement. Chasing even 5% on certain category spend usually just incentivizes overspending.

I’ve been lucky to be on some promotion where I can pay my rent for free using a credit card, so usually I just do that or buy prepaid Visa cards, which then isn’t tied to my identity when I transact with it.

Here in Brazil is legal for companies to charge a bit less for products if you pay in cash, because they don't have to pay 5% of the transaction for a bank when you're paying in cash.

Banks fought heavily against this law, of course.

In the US, Visa & Mastercard now allow a merchant to have a surcharge for card purchases (their policy changed in 2013), but whether you get hit by this will vary by state. And of course a merchant may build this surcharge into their prices so you don't see it. I have seen small restaurants (usually pizza places, for some reason) offer discounts for cash. If it's a local business you can always ask if a discount for cash is available.

https://lawpay.com/about/blog/can-you-charge-a-fee-or-surcha...

(disclosure: I used to work for a sister company of LawPay)

Google is busily collecting all the world's money in advertising profits while everyone tells themselves they have an individual immunity.

Advertising is generally an attack on subconscious cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are famously nearly undetectable by the user of the brain even if they are aware of the bias, and, just as famously, brain users find themselves fully convinced that the bias must not be present if they cannot detect it.

We have all the knowledge to tell us that we are very unlikely to be an exception, that we are almost certainly being personally manipulated by advertising, and yet our experience so powerfully tells us that we are immune that we simply don't believe it.

Cards with cash back and points charge a much higher rate to the merchant, so please don't use such cards at small businesses.

In terms of data mining: credit card companies seem to be the lesser of infinite evils. At least I can see what data they collect and they pay me for my data. I would still prefer they didn't do anything with my data, but at least I can opt out at any time by paying cash. A lot of companies take my data, I don't know, and I get nothing for it.

> and they pay me for my data.

From the fees that you paid them to begin with.

Sort of, but also not really because many merchants aren't going to give him a discount for paying in cash.

I agree, but there are of course other ways to refine the profile. Does the retailer have a loyalty program or send paperless receipts?

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