Physical Cash On Hand

[HexMachina]

2 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

I keep some fives in my car center console to tip the people who pump the gas. 

This practice has always baffled me. Why do you need people to put petrol/diesel in your vehicle?  I’ve never encountered this in the UK

[Hereward]

That’s because you’re young and/or have never visited the Highlands. I remember when self service first came in. People were alarmed and baffled!

[Ormond]

7 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

This practice has always baffled me. Why do you need people to put petrol/diesel in your vehicle?  I’ve never encountered this in the UK

Interesting to know this about the UK, but there are huge differences in this between countries in the world.

Though it was almost 20 years ago now, I well remember that when I was on my one big international vacation, to see wildlife in national parks in Kenya and Tanzania, that the gasoline (petrol) stations in those countries always had attendants to fill up the tanks. On my return flight to the USA I sat next to a man who worked for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta who said that when a Tanzanian colleague of his visited him in Georgia, he was appalled that most Americans pumped their own gas. To him that implied dire poverty. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

7 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

This practice has always baffled me. Why do you need people to put petrol/diesel in your vehicle?  I’ve never encountered this in the UK

It's only a few states where you can't pump your own, Oregon and New Jersey and maybe a couple others.

[Ormond]

1 minute ago, larrytheimp said:

It's only a few states where you can't pump your own, Oregon and New Jersey and maybe a couple others.

Oregon and New Jersey are the only states with laws banning self-service, and in Oregon now that law does not apply in counties with less than 40,000 people (and has been temporarily suspended in the rest of the state during the pandemic.) The town of Huntington on Long Island, New York also bans self-service gasoline, but that's the only other US jurisdiction mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station_attendant#United_States

[Lord of Oop North]

5 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

That sounds incredible strange to someone from Austria. Some banks grant accounts that you can't overdrawn to people with bad credit because it is as good as impossible to find a legal job that pays in cash.

This has definitely changed a lot in the last twenty years, but construction in Canada (and the United States too) is still relatively backwards compared to the rest of the economy. It is a very conservative industry, that resists change. It also has a high proportion of workers that live on the edge so to speak. You pay them every week on Friday, or they don't show up Monday.

Personally, I don't know anyone who did it because they didn't have bank accounts. But there were definitely people doing it to skip on paying taxes.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Quite a few jobs exist in some places that make no sense to people from other places. Greeters at stores make far less sense to me than other people pumping your petrol.

[Lord of Oop North]

17 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

This practice has always baffled me. Why do you need people to put petrol/diesel in your vehicle?  I’ve never encountered this in the UK

I don't know. With how dumb we have all realized society is over the last four years, I'm not sure that I trust people to distribute highly flammable petrol.

[Iskaral Pust]

16 minutes ago, Lord of Oop North said:

I don't know. With how dumb we have all realized society is over the last four years, I'm not sure that I trust people to distribute highly flammable petrol.

“If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it's that a male model's life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident.”

[AverageGuy]

12 hours ago, DMC said:

Interesting.  I had a bank account at 15, and while I believe I needed a parent to open the account I definitely did not need a parent to make withdrawals (or deposits).

Hm. It's possible my parents were lying to me so that I would save money. I also had the account at 8, but I didn't start get a paycheck until I was 16, so I may have made an assumption. Regardless of whether or not that was an actual restriction, my reaction was to keep cash on hand.

[Isis]

22 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

It's by no means always the case but I've worked in several bars where it was a second job for the staff and they were paid in cash to avoid the heavy tax they would otherwise have been charged. Legal, no, understandable, yes. This was long hour minimum wage work to top up a regular job to make ends meet for many of them. 

Yes, even in early 2020 I was doing some ad hoc brewery taproom shifts for cash wages. For a lot more than minimum wage though. Saved me having to go to the ATM. 

[Inkdaub]

20 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

This practice has always baffled me. Why do you need people to put petrol/diesel in your vehicle?  I’ve never encountered this in the UK

Yeah it's a bit strange when I think about it.  As others have mentioned we're not allowed to pump our own gas in Oregon.  Always good for a laugh when I wander into Washington and sit in my car at the station looking around like an idiot.  Once I figure out where I'm at it's actually sort of fun to do it myself.

I am unsure if the relatively new law that allows self service in smaller communities includes roadside stations on the highway but I assume so.   I haven't traveled south in my car since the exception was added.

 

[Clueless Northman]

19 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I also thought that there was maybe a non-zero chance that I could screw something up and the car would go up in flames if I attempted it on my own.

When I was a kid, I assumed there was some secret trick they knew and it was a bit risky to do it yourself, that's why we had people to pump gas. WHen I finally decided to get my driving license 15 years later, all this had changed - and even my mom always did it herself, so I could learn how it worked.

[Seli]

I haven't used cash in ages. So it is slowly accumulating in my wallet since some people pay back in cash.

I used to get around €70 and slowly spend it, and get more when going abroad. But I can pay with my debit card everywhere I've travelled in the past decade or so.