Legal tender status of euro cash: merchants call for reasonable exemptions from mandatory acceptance

Today in Europe, most merchants continue to offer consumers the option to pay in cash, despite a consistent decrease in the use of this payment method in everyday transactions. The principle of mandatory acceptance of Euro cash by merchants is therefore unnecessary, yet it may pose great difficulties in specific use cases. As a group of European organisations representing the interests of millions of merchants across Europe in key sectors of the economy, we are not against an obligation to accept Euro banknotes and coins but call on the co-legislators to ensure that it includes a pragmatic list of exemptions.

Unfortunately, the exemptions provided in the Commission proposal (Article 5(2)) fail to cover all ‘real world’ situations.

The co-legislators must extend the list of exemptions (Article 5(2)) to:

• Premises with unmanned (electronic) check-outs. Thanks to technological development, it is now becoming commonplace to open small retail shops with no cashier, with longer opening hours to serve customers in specific locations. Similarly, there are unmanned fuel stations, EV chargers, parking meters and vending machines (e.g. public transport). In such instances, it is highly undesirable to accept cash.
• Situations with high security/robbery risks: Shopkeepers in areas with high crime rates may often be exposed to robberies, aggression and physical or psychological harm. For their and their consumers’ safety, shopkeepers should legitimately be allowed to decline cash acceptance, as the only means of avoiding the recurrence of such violent and traumatic events. Similarly, maintaining a cash acceptance infrastructure for services onboard aircraft raises several important security and practical concerns.
• Specific situations where cash handling/acceptance entails disproportionate costs: Merchants should have a right to choose the payment methods they offer based on their prevalence and their costs. The cost of cash handling depends on several factors, including the frequency of cash used in daily payments, the cash supply costs, the type of business and its location. For instance, maintaining cash payments in remote areas with limited infrastructure (to obtain cash and for deposits), may prove to be disproportionately expensive. Another concern is the acceptance of cash aboard aircraft, which is extremely cumbersome given the logistic aspects of traveling to multiple/remote airports. When customers overwhelmingly favour digital payments and cash payments amount to only a very small minority of payments, the costs of cash handling can be disproportionately high. 

To this end, we call upon the co-legislators to:

• Support amendments extending the exemption in case of significant security risks;
• Introduce an exemption for payees operating unmanned self-check-outs;
• Introduce an exemption when payees would incur genuinely disproportionate costs for accepting cash compared to the cost of digital payments;
• Introduce an explicit exemption for onboard aircraft transactions.
• Maintain the current possibility of an ex-ante unilateral exclusion of the acceptance of cash payments (i.e. ‘no cash’ signs), as long as it does not undermine the role of cash as a legal tender in a given territory.

We count on your support to reach a balanced position and we remain open to further discussing these issues with you.