Just you wait for AI powered laundromats.

Can’t wait for that.. “you paid with an American credit card but the last time you used the laundromat you did not use the tumble dryer which is not American-like. And these are not American clothes; we detect as many scarves as a European would have, and those low crotch pants look Nepalese or African. Please contact our fraud office if you think we have made an error.”

Your CC got blocked, call your bank and solve it.

The account was in good standing worked daily, before and after the laundry attempt. When an online merchant blocks me my bank often tells me “it’s not coming from us; your account is fine on our side”.

I was never given the answer. How can you solve a problem when merchants will not tell you what the problem is? They think they are dealing with fraud so they are afraid to inform (who they regard as) a criminal. Getting information out of a merchant about a failed transaction is a social engineering effort on par with what hackers do.

When everyone else goes to the laundry and doesn’t have the right coins they should do exactly what? Take a trip downtown to the bank?

You can, and it would be a good exercise for you to see first hand how banks treat consumers when they tell you GTFO for asking for a small amount of coins. You will see for yourself that banks are unworthy of the power you give them.

Your local cigarettes shop isn’t obligated to break you a 20.

Fuck that shop then. They don’t want your business and have failed to earn it. It’s a worthy exercise just to know where you stand.

I barely use cash and my payments always work. … What am I doing wrong that digital payments always work for me?

You’re living a boxed in life just the way they want you to.

Much less frequently I cannot pay for digital reasons than for “oh fk, I forgot to withdraw cash again”. I remember that being a weekly problem.

So the one variable that is easily in your own control and you manage to fuck it up. You got issues. But certainly whatever puts you in a situation where an ATM is far from where you need one, you can fairly blame that on the banks who are the proactive cause for ATM sparsity.

I had to go check what community we're in because the downvotes you get don't make any sense. I guess people like dealing with metal pieces like they did 2000 years ago

It’s not a fear problem. It’s an engineering competency problem. They designed something more poorly engineered than the technology it replaced, so it never should have been rolled out. It’s a shitshow of failures and it excludes people, by design. Everyone should be able to clean their clothes, not just a select group who have the right combination of hardware, software, banking service, and unhealthy disregard for privacy and infosec.

Having dirty clothes because your bank card with matching logo was mysteriously refused for unspecified reasons and having to walk 1km to find a machine that works is a far cry from improving quality of life. Compare that to the quality of life someone feels is hindered when they have to carry coins from their apartment to the laundry room.

Lucky people in the included group should also be wise to realise there are excluded people and refuse to use it on that ethical basis.

Fear it when jerks abuse it to gain power

Misappropriation of power is inherently central to this design. Cash gives you freedom. Electronic payments give banks power over you. And they abuse it, like when they blocked donations to Wikileaks. They abuse it when they block you from using Tor. They abuse it when they lock your account because a document on file expired. Or when they require you to form an info-sharing relationship with Google and agree to Google’s terms just to download an app exclusively distributed by Google. It’s important to always have a bank-free option.

It really seems to showcase that schools have lost some competency with engineering. It’s a fundamental failure of basic principles when an engineer introduces a fuck ton of factors that can go wrong in place of something simple that just works. It’s an embarrassment to the engineering discipline.

German engineering used to be held in high regard¹.

It’s like the irrational drive to make everything as electronic as possible is somehow causing engineers to miss the KISS² principle.

¹ To be fair, I don’t know if the machines were designed in Germany.. just that they are used in Germany and Denmark. Nonetheless Germans would have an expectation of high engineering standards to be deployed.
² KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

OK, but you can attach a piece of tape to a coin and use just 1 coin to power the entire load. Unless it has one of those load all the coins into a tray at the same time and push them in mechanisms. Which, in that case, fuck coins.

Sometimes I hate that I can't downvote. This is just a very silly and mindless opinion. What the heck is your problem with having an option? With a possibility?

Is it that you prefer not to insert coins, or that you prefer not to end up with coins? In principle a machine could take bills, but then you’d be getting coins back if you need change.

I’ve seen a laundromat with a centralized cash machine. You can insert as much in bills and coins as you want, then you tap the numbers of the machines you want to send the credit to. This single transaction made it easy if you needed to start ~3+ washing machines. If you plan diligently, you can ensure you don’t end up with coins, but then you need to bring coins.

I prefer coins because the rejection rate seems to be far lower than banknotes. But euro coins are probably more sensibly denominated than other countries. The US is a bit of an embarrassment in this regard because the $1 liberty coins never caught on, so people need a ton of quaters or small banknotes would can get quite ratty.

My thoughts exactly!