Maybe my memory is faulty, but I never remembered having to pay a surcharge to use a credit card. Now everywhere I go there are signs saying that there is a 2.5-3.5% surcharge to use a car (and others that say that there’s a 2.5-3.5% discount for using cash, I assume to get around wording)
No, it’s the opposite. Humans make mistakes with cash, and the overall drag on the store’s operations (from needing a safe for large amounts of cash, physically transporting cash to be deposited at the bank, dealing with theft/loss) tends to be higher than credit cards.
That’s why a lot of places have switched to entirely cashless operations, because cash is slow and expensive for them.
You’re not wrong, cash does have more mistakes, but it evens out at the end, since you usually make mistakes both ways. Cash is riskier, yeah. But it’s also a lot cheaper depending on what the services and machines cost.
I remember a time when people were hesitant to use cards for small payments, and some places wouldn’t take them for small purchases.
Then cards became more popular and in recent years cash has been going away at least here, when it used to be that you had to be able to take cash.
But yeah mistakes happen with cards as well. They’re just way harder to fix from the client end. (Client as in the company/person using a card machine to charge someone something.)
But yeah it’s marginally easier to just take card payments but you have to keep the receipts from those as well just like you need to keep cash so there’s not that much of a difference in very small scales. (Like driving a taxi.) The bigger the scale the more it matters.