Is it legal for a brick and mortar establishment in France to reject cash as payment? Alice’s Restaurant or Bob’s corner shop in Paris or anywhere else in France wishes to go “card only”. Is this legally allowed?
France: No CashEssentials writes French Authorities Remind Merchants that Accepting Cash is Obligatory France practices what is sometimes referred to as a hard version of legal tender. That means that the acceptance of cash is compulsory by law. According to article R642-3 of the penal code, the refusal to accept coins and banknotes which are legal tender is punished by a second-class fine, which is currently set at €150. Edit: another source of information is in Can shops in France refuse to take payments in cash? Some exceptions remain There are some circumstances, however, where shops are not legally required to accept cash payments. If coins or banknotes are in poor condition, shops can refuse to take them If you try to use more than 50 coins to make a single payment If a shop does not have the correct money to give you change Finally, some shops are authorised not to accept cash payments for safety reasons (such as shops that open late at night). This extends to objects, such as parking meters, which are allowed to be fully cashless to limit cases of vandalism. Canada: Yes CBC News writes Is it legal for a store to refuse my cash? The Bank of Canada says it's up to sellers to determine what kinds of payment they will accept for transactions, and there is &quot;no law&quot; that would require anyone to accept bank notes or any other form of payment for a commercial transaction. However, in certain circumstances, refusing to take cash in a store may actually violate provincial human rights codes. UK: Yes The UK Parliament reports on a petition that they debated Make it unlawful for shops to refuse cash payments. Make it illegal for retailers and services to decline cash payments. The government does not plan to mandate cash acceptance. While the government recognises the ability to transact in cash remains important to millions of people across the UK, particularly those in vulnerable groups, it remains the choice of individual businesses as to whether to accept or decline any form of payment, including cash or card. This may be based on factors such as customer preference and cost.
As noted in your update, Cal. Civ. Code section 1947.3 says (a) (1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), a landlord or a landlord's agent shall allow a tenant to pay rent and deposit of security by at least one form of payment that is neither cash nor electronic funds transfer. Paragraph 2 related to cases of recent bounced checks, and it sounds like you don't have that problem. From the personal finance angle, if you liked the convenience of the online service but don't trust the new ACH agent, your bank may have an "online bill pay" service where they can withdraw money at a designated time each month and send it. Chase has such a service, no charge, they do an electronic transfer if the payee accepts them and otherwise mail a paper check.
If you are in Florida, the notion that this is &quot;the only store around&quot; is simply not accurate. I doubt that there is any place in Florida that is not within 15-20 miles of at least two stores. In any case, the store is within its rights to ban you from the store even if you acted lawfully.
Forget whether or not it's legal; it's mathematically stupid. The store owner gets no advantage by taxing you on each individual item vs. just taxing the bill as a whole because of the distributive property of multiplication. A(x) + B(x) + C(x) is exactly the same as (A + B + C)x You can try this on a calculator and you'll get the exact same answer each time. The only possible benefit to the pizza place by doing it that way would be the cumulative effect of rounding. But even if they were being that shady, it only amounts to a few pennies per customer. Not exactly a profitable criminal enterprise. More than likely what happened is the waitress didn't quite know how to ring you up so she made corrections to the ticket trying to fix something.
Yes This statute means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise.
I am not aware of any law making this illegal. You need to avoid any "bait and switch" tactics, though, like initially offering cola for $1 and then not actually letting them buy it for that price.
The fact that the terms and conditions do not mention the word &quot;disable&quot; is significant, but not in the way you seem to think. You state: &quot;...the merchant's T&amp;C which does not explicitly allow the merchant to charge a fee for a disabled account&quot;. However, this doesn't mean that the merchant needs to explicitly state that they may. What it actually means is that the merchant does not recognize the term &quot;disable&quot; in the context of terminating the service contract. (Did they use stop, terminate, delete, eliminate, fall into disuse, log off, etc. or any other similar expressions?) You haven't defined what &quot;disable&quot; means, but perhaps it is more like a &quot;pause&quot; in service for which payment is still required? (Like having the post office hold your mail vs terminating all deliveries.) What you need to do is to read the section of the T&amp;Cs that deals with terminating service and payment, understand what is required, and execute the procedures they describe. Whatever words they use, do that. If you have done all the steps and can prove it then you have a case against them, otherwise you are arguing semantics and interpretation... As to the title question, it does not appear that any &quot;law&quot; has been broken, this is just a contractual misunderstanding. P.S. This is the reason why I always set up payments through my bank to &quot;push&quot; money to vendors rather than authorizing them to &quot;pull&quot; money from me. When I am done I notify them and stop paying. I don't need to ask them to please stop taking it from me.
The store is, as far as i can see, not using the trademarked image to sell their cake. Your family does not intend to sell anything at all. This photo, from the description, could not reasonably be confused with an official image from the trademark holder. (all of this is based on your description, of course). Therefore, the trademark holder probably won't sue for trademark infringement, even if they somehow heard of this event, and if they did sue, they would quite likely lose. You would be making a copy of a presumably copyrighted image. You might have an active defense, but that is very hard to be sure of in advance. (Note that "fair use" is a very specifically US legal concept, and would not apply in the UK. The roughly comparable concept is "fair dealing" but that is more restrictive, and follows somewhat different rules.) In any case, it is possible that the rights holder would sue, and if the situation were a bit different (the was only one person pictured, making the shirt with the protected image very prominent, for example) there might be a larger chance of such a suit being successful. No business is going to want a bakery department manager deciding whether a particular use of a particular image does or does not infringe IP rights, and whether it does or does not expose the business to significant risk. Just to get an opinion from their lawyer on whether this image infringes would probably cost them several times the price of the cake with image printing. The store has no doubt written its guidelines to err well on the side of caution, because one suit, even if they won, would cost far more than the profits of many cakes, and if they lost, could have a very negative effect on their bottom line indeed. The store is entitled to restrict what business it does to keep itself safe from lawsuits. It is going to keep well on the cautious side, in all likelihood, and so it should. I fear you will have to find a store with a different policy, or use a different picture.