Your cash isn't good here, restaurant tells patrons

Suze Orman isn't gonna like this.

Neither is any personal finance coach worth her salt. The steady message coming from most of them has been the same drumbeat of wisdom: Cut off those credit cards! Stop buying on credit! Only spend money you have in your hand!

Commerce, a restaurant in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, thinks that last suggestion is just the problem: That's why the place sent out a strange press release to publications including New York magazine that announced a brand new payment policy for its customers: No more cash, only credit cards.

Your money is no good there.

"With robberies on the rise in the West Village," the release said, the new policy, "will eliminate the dangerous situation that employees face when walking to local banks with large sums of cash."

Cash-only policies can be a stumbling block to a sociable evening. We've all been to a dinner where someone in our party had to bail on the coffee to go find and ATM because they realized too late that plastic wasn't accepted. But requiring customers to work on credit? That's a new kind of switcheroo.