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The ubiquity of smartphones and traditional plastic has paved the way to increasing numbers of cashless restaurants in the NYC area, but one politician wants them banned because he thinks the concept is “classist and racist.” Ritchie J. Torres suggests they’re inadvertently “excluding lower-income communities,” which comprise folks “who might not be able to afford smartphones loaded with digital currency such as Apple Pay or qualify for credit cards.”
“I started coming across coffee shops and cafés that were exclusively cashless and I thought: But what if I was a low-income New Yorker who has no access to a card?” he says in a Q&A with Grub Street. “I thought about it more and realized that even if a policy seems neutral in theory, it can be racially exclusionary in practice. Therein lies the problem with card-only policies. I see it as a way to gentrify the marketplace.”
“I started coming across coffee shops and cafés that were exclusively cashless and I thought: But what if I was a low-income New Yorker who has no access to a card?” he says in a Q&A with Grub Street. “I thought about it more and realized that even if a policy seems neutral in theory, it can be racially exclusionary in practice. Therein lies the problem with card-only policies. I see it as a way to gentrify the marketplace.”
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