Paying in Cash: An Anecdote of SB 1565’s Cost

In the short session of 2022, the Oregon legislature passed SB 1565, mandating businesses accept physical currency as a method of payment. Last year, they doubled down on this, passing SB 1176, which directed the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) on enforcement.

This is a classic example of how voters tell pollsters they want affordability but cast ballots electing representatives mandating unnecessary costs on businesses. When accepting cash makes sense to a business, they don’t need this regulation. When cutting cash out of processes will save everyone money, such an opportunity is lost. I spent more than an hour in a Taco Bell waiting for my dinner recently, because of this.

My mother was in the hospital in North Portland, and I was driving my dad home, all the way to Eagle Creek (where I grew up). On the way, he offered to buy me dinner. We were discussing where, when I suggested it would be fun to eat at the Sandy Taco Bell where I worked as a teenager around 35 years ago, to see how it has changed.

We made that decision somewhere in Gresham. If I were paying, I’d order our dinner on my phone as we’re stopped at a red light. It would be ready for us when we reach Sandy. I mentioned this to my dad, telling him that if you go into a Taco Bell today, they will look at you like you’re weird if you try to order at a cash register.

It got weirder. After complying with the sign at the counter that said to please use the kiosk to order, the mounted tablet could not accept cash. The process to comply with Oregon’s regulation was to push a pay with cash button and then go to the counter, where an employee would take your bucks. I thought my dad did this, since he walked over to the counter afterwards. I failed to realize that, having no employee there to help him, he thought they would just ask for his money when they completed our order.

That was a mistaken assumption. The order never went through, but we waited there for some time, thinking it had. Eventually, a manager noticed we’d been waiting for a while and inquired. She discovered they had no order from us.

Yet the problem didn’t end there. She happily took my dad’s order and his cash at the counter, like it’s 1989, possibly using one of the registers I once used. That order was promptly made, but then taken over to the drive-through and handed to someone else through their window. So, there we were, waiting again for an awkwardly long time.

The second mistake was discovered when the driver walked in to complain about getting the wrong order. It appears that the old-fashioned cash register is so seldom used, the workers on the food line did not recognize its direction where the order should go. Their system gets clear labeling from the drive-through, your phone, or the kiosk, but the old register doesn’t interface with the new system clearly enough (or often enough) for the worker to know that it was a dine-in order.

While this experience would have been better had our order been placed on a phone while en route, none of this Taco Hell would have happened if the business had been allowed, under Oregon law, to clearly say at its kiosk that they are a cash-free business.

Of course, many customers, like my dad, prefer to pay in paper bills and coins. Policymakers need not worry. There will be businesses that cater to that preference. We’d know Taco Bell doesn’t accept cash and go somewhere else. It’s when the government mandates these kinds of things that we get a mismatch of consumer preferences and business processes.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.