Do you know how sometimes when you use your debit card you just sign your signature and sometimes you have to enter your four-digit pin number? Well, there is a whole depressing backstory to that distinction. And, if you enter a pin number, you save the store a bunch of money.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
But if you enter a pin number, you also cost yourself a bunch of money. A little fact left out the article. So who do you want to pay it to is the only decision.
I use a debit card almost all the time and the great majority of those times I have to enter my PIN.
How does that cost me a whole bunch of money?
Our bank cards distinguish between debit (PIN – immediate authorization), and credit (signature – delayed authorization). Used to be cheaper for the vendors if we used debit.
And I get miles if I sign instead of using my pin. Not a tough choice for me.
Miles are a good motivation. However, knowing that they charge the store 2% for each non-Pin purchase, I’ll go with the Pin if it’s a small thing at the corner store. If it’s Walmart, I tell them to eat the 2%.
I nearly always pay cash at mom & pop-type places – yeah, I know cash feels weird, but I spend a lot of time in third world countries where they only take cash, so I’m kinda used to it.
Amazingly, I was just thinking about this very subject the other night. As usual, it occurred to me that the government is falling down on the job, this time in its capacity as the provider and guardian of the money supply. The fact that we’re now moving away from paper currency to electronic has very simply been completely ignored by Congress, to the delight of Big Finance of course.
But really: doesn’t government have an obligation to insure that we don’t have to pay bankers for the right to spend our own money? Even to a libertarian, it seems to me that should be a core function of government.
Huh. I was thinking about the same thing. Must have been triggered by some new bank outrage against their customers. Seems to me the government has quietly privatized its constitutional duty to issue currency. For-profit businesses now issue and control the de facto currency of the world.
On the vanishingly rare occasions when anything like this is brought up, the defense is always that you don’t have to use the cards if you don’t want to. That’s a lie for almost everybody, unless you don’t want to buy anything online, rent a care, buy an airline ticket without major hassle, or participate in the modern economy in dozens of other ways. It’s kind of like complaining about the healthcare system and being told, well, so don’t use medical treatment.
Where are the damn lawyers when you need them?
I like to rent cares because I haven’t collected enough of my own yet. Not proofreading is getting me there, though.
And I guess renting cares is easier on the budget than buying them. 🙂