My name is David Edwards and I am the owner of New Mexico Tea Company. I was asked by SMTB1963 to respond to some of the discussion.
I just visited NM Tea Company in Albuquerque, NM.
Thank you for coming in, I hope you are enjoying your tea!
The rebuttal would be that the dollar could also be worth 50% less the next day.
Yes, but it wont! And if it does, I have a lot worse issues to deal with then buying more tea... like finding a bunker to hide in!
Scared implies an emotional not logical response. Most likely he never lost a single cent using Bitcoin he is simply uninformed. He likely starting thinking wait I could lose 50% and what if I get 10,000 orders that I lose 50%? I would be bankrupted. The reality is he doesn't have 10,000 bitcoin orders and he isn't going to lose 50%. He certainly isn't going to lose 50% on every single order.
Oh and edit the wiki to remove him. No sense in giving him free advertising as a bitcoin business if he doesn't accept bitcoins.
I am looking at it logically, and last year the potential gain did not out weight the risk. I saw within a few months bit coin go from $2 to $8 to $16 to $60 (!) and then back down to $8. I had people who wanted to buy tea when it was at $60, if I had done that then I would have lost a significant amount. I also did not want to keep flip flopping and accept them, then not accept them, then accept them again, so I decided to stop all together.
Maybe the system has calmed down now... I have not looked at it in about a year. So you can say... "well just sell all your bit coins for $60 when you take them for $60"... but I have other aspects of this business to run as well. I cant be monitoring bitcoin all day!
the current exchanges are anything but "easy to use "
intersango is fcked (cant get money in or out) ,gox has got too much rules and regulations and delays and i dont personally trust small exchanges with big transactions
so i would prefer person to person trading ,face to face if necessary
I used Mtgox and my bit coin last year, both got hacked right after I sold all my coins.
Also the value could double as easily as halve and if he thinks otherwise he has a worse opinion of the value than average and obviosly should not accept it in his store.
I am not running a speculative business, nor do I really have much interest in the nitty gritty of finance. I do like the idea of bitcoin as a marketing tool, which is why I experimented with it last year. At the time I made the determination that the extra rigamarole, and possibility of loosing money (Remember I have to buy the product your buying. I only have a certain margin to work with before im paying you to buy it!) was not worth the extra business that it was bringing in.
However, technology has moved on... I did not know about bit-pay, so maybe its time to take another look at it.
Thank you everyone for your input and thoughts on this.