I don't know about Sweden or EU but in The Netherlands cash is legal tender. If a shop does not clearly communicate cash isn't accepted, you can consider your transaction finalized. Its the problem of the business; not the customer.
It should be noted that in the UK, legal tender has a very narrow definition - it applies only to paying a debt at a court. It doesn't apply to your local shops. This is a common misconception.
But it's de facto the same in most shops. If you pick up some goods and walk out of the shop leaving some cash on the counter... what recourse do they have?
OK, the shop might not be happy about it, but you owe them the value of goods, and you've paid them in legal tender to the correct amount.
If the shop allows you to run up a tab, you can pay it off with legal tender. If the shop does not extend credit to you, you may not take the goods unless you have something the owner is willing to accept in trade. If the owner demands only gold or silver, you cannot legally pay with a bank note.
If you leave bank notes of sufficient value and run out, they are very unlikely to attempt to prosecute you, but they could, both for the theft and the nuisance of leaving your property lying around in their store. And the case would probably be resolved on appeal somewhere, with one judge arguing that the state has an inherent interest in having its primary currency universally accepted by all businesses in its jurisdiction, and another arguing that the state is overreaching when it tells shopkeepers what they must accept as payment.
In England that's theft. This is clear and unambiguous.
See for example thean who took cash from his company safe, and replaced the same value a week later, but who was convicted of theft because the notes were different. See R v Velyumi here: https://www.lawteacher.net/cases/theft-cases.php
Dishonestly would be a key factor there. If you believe you have the legal right to do that, or you believe that the owner of the goods would have consented, then you have not acted dishonestly, and there is no theft. If you do so to as you believe that the owner would not accept cash, you have acted dishonestly and thus there is a theft.[1]
Note that Velumyl was an appeal on the grounds that the defendant did not intend to permanently deprive, thus the money being different was relevant as he permanently deprived the owner of that specific property. Had the defendant contented there was no dishonestly -- that he intended to return equivalent funds and believed that the company would consent -- the decision may well have been different.
Not true. Say for example you went to a restaurant, a nice fancy one with a few friends, and ran up a £1000 bill. Now £1 coins are legal tender for any amount, which simply means that if you are trying to pay off a £1000 debt at a court of law, you could dump a pile of 1000 £1 coins on their desk, just to be awkward. However, the restaurant is not bound by legal tender rules, and is quite within its rights to ask you to pay using a more reasonable method, like say £20 or £50 notes, or a bank card.
I think something was lost in translation there... cash is legal tender everywhere; that just means it's not worthless paper.
Besides, this seems a bit of an "originalist" view of commercial transactions. I bet if I tried to pull that off, the police would take a dim view. But who knows, the Netherlands are a strange place.
There's not a debtor/creditor relationship in a private retail transaction, at least in the USA. It is an exchange of value, not an extension of credit.
A retail store is perfectly permitted to have a "no cash accepted" policy. Even the public transit here generally has a "no cash" policy for fares.
That's nice. In Sweden various retailers and others that sell services claim that cash is a nuisance, a cost or a danger.
For example, bus companies have had "cash strikes" after robberies, claiming cash is a danger against their working environment, and as a result nowadays most buses are cashless.
Retail shops and banks alike publicize and complain about the cost of handling cash transports securely.
We can guess these are probably complaints towards an end: yes, they want to save money. There is no vision or will to keep accepting cash.
Sadly, people aren’t replacing cash with EC (a very cheap interbanking card standard that’s local to Germany) but with VISA/MasterCard, foreign companies that demand foreign laws be followed in Germany, holding an oligopoly, and having massively inflated fees.
I’d be the first proponent of a cashless society if we’d ban VISA and MasterCard from operating here.
Hopefully EC will survive. I used it while living in Germany and I understood the point, there were some that didn't accept anything else, obviously, because of the fees with other payment cards.
German banks were also very accessible for foreigners.
It should be noted that it can be contractually waived in most cases, e.g. by a poster saying "no cash accepted" in a store. And it's not like this law is actually enforced as anyone who has ever tried paying with cash at Berlin's city administration can attest to. If not even they obverse they law I wouldn't put much value into it.
> It should be noted that it can be contractually waived in most cases, e.g. by a poster saying "no cash accepted" in a store.
Exactly how it works in The Netherlands as well.
Source: I worked in a coffeeshop, and got fed up with all the customers who wanted to pay by card which we did not accept (at that time) so consulted a lawyer on how to deal with this. It has to be communicated clearly, though I don't remember if it was at entrance or at the counter (IIRC the latter).
There is a debtor/creditor relationship after you've walked out of the shop with the goods without paying. But if you left some money, you paid, so the debt is settled.
I don't know if this argument would hold up in court, as it can easily be gamed. But what are they going to have you do? Go and get the cash back and then pay it to the shopkeeper in court?
EDIT: On coming back to this, I agree with everything you said. I thought you had replied to my other comment in this thread where I proposed a way to pay with cash even where cash "isn't accepted", by just walking out of the shop "without paying", but leaving the correct amount of cash on the counter.
