The kiosks are part of renovations that McDonald’s has been pushing stores to adopt, with the lion’s share of the costs being paid by the franchisees. Business Insider reports that many restaurant owners have had to shell out as much as $750,000 per store for these upgrades.
Given that they make a considerable portion of McDonald’s target markets, the “unbanked” — people without a bank account or debit or credit card — account for about 6.5% of U.S. households. That’s 8.4 million people.
It’s not just big businesses that are going cashless. Even small mom-and-pop and hipster establishments (including Florida Eats, which recently opened on my neighborhood — and then closed soon after, despite being popular) are no longer accepting cash.
There are a number of reasons for going cashless:
There are downsides to going cashless:
I’m not a regular fast food customer, but there are times when it’s unavoidable. When that happens I pay in cash only, and it’s for an increasingly important reason: so that insurance companies can’t find out.
Companies are increasing their reliance on data mining for all sorts of things (that’s why I’ve been sharpening my Python and Jupyter Notebooks skills), including reducing risk. Insurance companies, whose entire business model is based on betting when you’ll die or get robbed, are gathering as much data about you as they can, which includes your credit card purchase history. That’s why any fast food purchase I make is done with cash.
I got the idea from Kevin Pledge of Toronto-based Insight Data Solutions:
Insurers’ interest in data mining will only grow, says Kevin Pledge, the boss of Insight Decision Solutions, an underwriting-technology consultancy based near Toronto... Insurance firms will also analyse grocery purchases for clues about policyholders, he predicts. But that raises some sticky questions about privacy. Mr Pledge himself has begun to forgo his supermarket loyalty-card discount on junk food and pay for his burgers in cash. Promising as data mining is, much will depend on how regulators, and consumers, react.
I’m not so worried about my grocery purchases — we cook, so we tend to buy ingredients rather than pre-packaged food, and we don’t buy much junk food. I do have a gym membership (and I actually go at least a couple of times a week) but I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a subscription to a fitness magazine, if only to improve my insurance risk profile.
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