It's kinda scary how finance and payment processing companies can just destroy a company and a whole bunch of people's livelihoods by themselves just because they decide they don't like what they sell, and have no oversight whatsoever preventing them from doing this.

  • DasKarlBarx [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Same thing happened with weed shops in California after it became legal (and is still happening). You have to pay in cash. You can use cards but they charge you an ATM fee and give you change back from the nearest $5 interval.

    All because finance institutions don't want to touch those transactions.

      • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Yeah, OP has a very good point, but a lot of private sector decisions like this are partly (and in some cases, mostly) driven by the risk of operating in legal grey areas. It's the same process by which sanctions that technically allow food, medicine, etc. have the practical effect of choking those things off (banks don't want to run the risk of financing something that falls outside what's legal and getting assets frozen/seized).

        Of course there's plenty to be said about the massive influence private companies have in writing laws in the first place, what laws the government chooses to enforce, and what laws private companies choose to flout.

        • ImSoOCD [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          There’s a reason banks have giant departments dedicated just to compliance and internal audits. It’s certainly not out of the goodness of their hearts

      • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        There's a 0.0% of the Feds seizing a major bank's funds because it's from weed sales. They don't do it because the bank owners also don't want weed to be legal - Capitalist class solidarity.