When Governor William Bligh arrived in Sydney in 1805, one of the first changes he made was to prohibit the use of rum as currency. The convict fleets had not brought any decent coin supplies, so from ~1792, the real currency of New South Wales was rum. It would buy anything! A man sold his wife for four gallons. Capturing a bushranger was worth five gallons. Wages paid in 1793 to the builders of Sydney’s first church came in rum, and Governor Macquarie paid for the building of a road between Sydney and Liverpool with 400 gallons of rum.
On 26 January 1808, the NSW Corps arrested Governor Bligh and held him under house arrest for a year. The now infamous Rum Rebellion had voiced the opinion that rum should be accepted as a payment method.
There is a lot of competition in business, so you need to make it as easy as possible for a client to deal with you. You need to ensure that you accept every possible form of payment—including all credit cards.
I am your classic modern-day credit card shopper. I carry no cash and pay for everything with plastic. Too many times I have tried to make a purchase at a cafe or convenience store, and they are cash only. My solution? I typically walk out and go to the next one that accepts a credit card. There are two main reasons a business is “cash only.” First, they may be evading tax by “pocketing” the cash. I don’t like to support a business that relies on other people to pay taxes. The more common reason is that business owners are looking at their expense line and trying to save on merchant fees rather than looking at the lost sales.
In 1989, I was charged 4 per cent in credit card merchant fees. Despite the high fees, I still allowed clients to use plastic as I believed that I needed to make it as easy as possible to deal with me. Now, with merchant fees around 0.5 percent, it is actually cheaper for clients to use credit cards rather than cash, so there is no reason not to take plastic. And if someone wants to pay you in a universal commodity like rum, then take that as well!