There couldn’t be too much complaint about getting rid of coppers though. Unless there is high demand for penny sweets.

Charities make millions out of coppers. All those charity tins on checkouts, pub bars, fast food tills and so on. People pay with a tenner, get a load of change including a handful of coppers, the coppers go into the tin.

They’ve already seen a massive dent in takings as more and more people go contactless, obviously lockdown has had a huge impact too but every time there’s talk of phasing out coppers, the charities fight back big time.

Pub landlord here…. my view… (high turnover pub & hotel in a city for reference)

We considered stopping taking cash pre-covid but decided it wasn’t worth the constant arguments with punters who ‘didn’t see’ the signs, and claim not to have a debit card for a £5 drink. Since COVID we have not taken cash, and it’s been brilliant. Not going back to accepting cash when things all get back to normal.

Pro’s and cons:

pros:
-Card machine is cheaper (0.03 pence per transaction, plus small monthly fees)
-Most transactions are contactless so quicker to serve customers.
-No cost of buying change anymore. We typically bought £2k worth of change from bank per week at 1-1.5% withdrawal fee (£30 per week, or £1560 per year!)
-Our managers spend around 10 hours per week cashing up and doing banking. They cost about £20ph so that’s £10.4k per annum of labour cost saved.
-No money goes missing from theft.
-Not taking cash all acts as a ‘virtual bouncer’ in that the customers most likely to harass staff, shit themselves on the gents floor, linger at the bar hassling young barmaids etc now have no method of buying something so leave immediately without causing hassle…

Cons:
-We lose some sales. There is type of customer who pays in fifty pound notes as a status thing, and they walk out. The South Wales tourists seem to use cash a lot too.

Other thoughts: a lot of pubs/takeaways etc that only accept cash are obvs taking the piss and underdeclaring their income from it for tax purposes, very easy to do. First pub/club I worked in twenty years ago had a ‘card and cash till’ and ‘just cash till’ quite obviously so that they could not declare the cash till but still show income, easily hidden in poor GP%, excessive line cleaning that never happened etc.

My friend paid his builder £25k cash for an extension, I’m sure that never saw HMRC so I feel like I’m helping society stopping the tax-dodgers who don’t wan’t to chip in to society like I do. But at the very lowest level I do feel the government should create a bank (the post office??) for those in society the banks won’t allow to have even accounts & basic debit cards. Everyone should have access to a bank account and debit card as a right I feel.

Overall though we won’t be going back.

We were having a discussion maybe 20 years ago that the only folk worth mugging in the future would be the poor as no one else would be carrying cash. I can’t recall the last time I carried cash. Maybe when a group of us were going out for a meal as that made it easier to split the bill but the restaurants are all fine with multi card payments now. There’s a reusable token in the car for shopping trolleys and a few coins for parking meters where they don’t take contactless or app payment.

Pub landlord here….

In my local (when such things were allowed) my drinking group just has a pot behind the bar with our name on it. We all stick in £20 when we arrive. There will usually be a second round of £10 or £20 put in if it is a decent session. Anything left over is just left in the pot for next week.

So that’s cash.. but in a pretty minimalist, no change kind of way. 😀

In my local (when such things were allowed) my drinking group just has a pot behind the bar with our name on it.

My friends and I use splitwise.
Doesnt actually transfer the money, just keeps track of it. So you can add every spend by every person, and then it will tell you who owes who what.

If its and ongooing group, just a quick look at who’s in the red and who’s in the black can determine who’s round it is, and you can keep going indefinitely, never actually transfering any money, potentially only being a few quid up or down at any point.

Didn’t visa card services go down a while ago?

Yes, but some acquirers stood in for them. MasterCard have also gone done in the last 3 years – which is why I have more than one card brand in my wallet. And £30 in cash.

I’m looking forward to the day that cash, cards and phones are all gone. Just whack a chip in me that lets me use my eyes to pay or something. The less crap to have to shove in my pockets the better.

I actually got given cash at Christmas by the MIL, because the shops were too covid riddled to go and buy an Amazon voucher, but cash points are clean as a whistle? Not that I wanted or needed either. It’s still sat in my wallet being useless, where am I going to spend it eh? I joked about rolling a note up really right and cramming it into my phone to use online…

All our food is delivered at present, I barely ever went to the pub before it was shut, anything else I want to buy I tend to go online.

When the apocalypse kicks off properly money (physical or on a server) will have zero value, the only things that we’ll be using as currency will be shotgun cartridges, bog rolls and nectar points I assume…

But at the very lowest level I do feel the government should create a bank (the post office??) for those in society the banks won’t allow to have even accounts & basic debit cards

Instead they forced the big banks to offer Basic Bank Accounts – a bit like a prepaid card, you can’t spend the money that you don’t have, every transaction is authorised online. Not perfect but could be made universal – and costs the government nothing, they just tell the banks it’s a condition of doing business.

The US did something similar at the end of the 90s, paying benefits onto special purpose debit cards that could only be used in certain types of shop e.g. supermarkets but not liquor stores.

As a small business I still take cash. And I still pay for things in cash on a regular basis.

Indeed, that’s one of the key reasons for getting rid of it IMHO. (Not you specifically, but cash transactions in general)

Everyone should have access to a bank account and debit card as a right I feel.

Metro Bank do a basic cash account for exactly this purpose

I hate cash – I pay for pretty much everything by phone now.

I transfer £100-150 from my business account to my revolut card and use that in Google pay to buy everything non-business as it doesn’t charge me a transaction fee unlike my business account.
My girls never use cash either.

Conversely the (rich builder) husband of a friend has loads of cash literally everywhere… For example £20k in the hidden safe in the house, about £10k in the roof of his campervan in the garage, etc!
He pays cash for everything he can while, interestingly, his wife uses a credit card for 90% of her purchases 🤷🏻‍♂️

Get rid, now.

If anyone has cash laying around that they want recycled in a professional way you can send it to me 😀

Even the big issue seller outside my front door takes contactless cards now too. I imagine there must be huge decline in cash given to beggars though surely? I used to give spare change years ago (or notes when drunk!) but since I don’t carry cash, ever, anymore I haven’t for about 5+ years.

In fact the one problem I have with cash is I stop by at the farm entrance with the honesty box for the eggs…. I’m running out of smash now to pay. Ive already raided my wee boys piggy bank.

In fact the one problem I have with cash is I stop by at the farm entrance with the honesty box for the eggs…. I’m running out of smash now to pay. Ive already raided my wee boys piggy bank

Meanwhile we’re drowning in pound coins from our egg honesty box now that we can’t give them to the kids to pay for their school meals. Wanna swap?

(Well not drowning exactly, we haven’t got that many hens, but there must be a hundred quid in the quarantine pot)

In the Lakes last summer a few places were cash only. Campsites and chippy.

One cafe’s card machine went down and the Q backed up. The staff were getting really stressed. They should either give the food away or ask folk to call back later or pay online with ping it or something.

Frustrating when you have the means to pay and they won’t accept it.

Bit like having cash and a business not accepting it:)

It’s tricky isn’t it.

Mate has lived in Norway for 3 years and he tells me he has never seen cash there.

Mate has lived in Norway for 3 years and he tells me he has never seen cash there.

He is of course exaggerating. I did work on the new bank note series the Norwegian central bank has only just introduced…

But yeah, that is where things are headed worldwide, and I’m all for it.

Card machine is cheaper (0.03 pence per transaction, plus small monthly fees)

I’m assuming that’s 3p and not 0.03 p?

Typo, my bad, sorry: it’s 0.3% charge (actually it’s 0.27% on the lowest card but 0.3% is the average)

But it’s 1.5% charge to pay in cash at the bank. Hefty difference if you pay in £10k cash a week!

I’ve stopped shopping in a lot of the smaller local shops since Covid. Feel a bit guilty about it but I really don’t want to be handling cash and many of them are still cash only. I’d make an exception before just because it was the only option but generally I don’t see any reason to be using physical money in this day and age. It’s just an inconvenience.

I hoped hsbc would do too, but not via their mobile app at least.

I can pay cheques in on my HSBC mobile app!!

genuinely quite surprised this is so one sided

couple of points

– online banking, yeah all great till your laptop picks up a virus, bad one, scan ongoing, and half your ‘access’ is cut off (same for power or BB outages) with the extra paranoia in the next few days that anything i have accessed in recent days is potentially compromised and needs securing

– buying rounds, if you dont know which of your mates is up/down then you need to rethink those mates, the one, yeah that one, ensure he buys the first round regularly and explain why

take cash out of the bank and shop local, else soon you wont have those options… someone mentioned lazy stereotyping earlier, well to say that any local business that likes cash/has a broken card machine is tax dodging….

– kids pocket money, via an app that you pay for… wow.

I was all for cash until about 2 years ago when I received this £20 note out a cash machine, complete with a bogie:

Pretty happy not to touch it anymore.

re: investing the money you have in your account – I recon the average current account probably has less than £2k in it over the average year. a bank can lend most of that out as a loan or mortgage (provided the ratios are ok) – I think they have to hold back 20% or so. So they can lend out £1600. Assuming that there are no costs involved in servicing the mortgage, they might be pulling in 1.5% interest rate – or approx £24 in ‘profit’ from having all your wages. You could blow that in the wrapped up cost of a single phone call to their call centre.

There is a big drive for ‘shop local’ or ‘shop British’ but there should also be a pay with cash drive….

No, there should be a low fees for small businesses drive. Then we all get what we want.

How come monkeyboyjc is paying 2.5% and redfox is only paying 0.3%?

For redfox monthly fees are on top which do add up.

But monkeyboyjc is paying over the odds by the sounds of things

I pay a flat rate of 1.0% with no other fees (izettle). We could save a little bit by switching to a contract but other factors (hassle/reliability/hardware) have so far prevented me.

I would echo redfoxs comments about going cashless.

It has been great in my business. Overall being cashless is quicker to serve customers, less mistakes, no security worries, saves time counting & banking, cheaper, and more hygienic.

Truth is we do actually have a small cash float for the occasional customer who really needs it. That’s been maybe 10 in 6 months.

I have not experienced customers shitting on the floor, but if cashless makes that less likely then all the better!

Cash is dying and will die out. It’s inevitable. From my generation and younger are almost all converted over to electronic forms of paying and the older generation who still prefer cash wont be around forever. One big driver that will affect peoples behaviour is the inevitability that free personal banking will end soon. We’ll all have to start paying for services from banks now they’re not earning due to depressed interest rates. And there will be a charge for using cash soon…we’ll have to pay to withdraw it and that will push people to electronic payment methods. Shops may have to pay additional charges to process them and will have the dilemma of passing charges onto customers or soaking them up as a business operating cost, but that is no different to any other charge or cost a business faces. And it will be a simple case of the comparison of additional business costs of electronic payments vs. the value of the loss of business for not offering the convenience of electronic payments to your customers…and customers do value convenience.

COVID has helped things. Around me the small handful of businesses who used to be cash only are now offering electronic payments and business has increased with those, so will be interesting if they revert back after COVID. I suspect most if any wont.

I’m not sure if I’ll miss cash. Can’t remember the last time I went to an ATM and whenever I receive cash these days I’m looking to offload it ASAP as it’s just a PITA. Had a tenner kicking about on my home desk for months now looking for an opportunity to spend it. I’ve been almost entirely electronic for payments for so long now. The idea of having to seek out the nearest ATM before going to a shop now is as ridiculous as walking to the bottom of the garden in the middle of the night to go to the toilet like they did in the days before toilets in houses, or getting up off the sofa to walk over to the TV to press a button to change the channel in the days before TV remote controls.

How come monkeyboyjc is paying 2.5% and redfox is only paying 0.3%?

Because I prob take less in a day than he does in an hour? Volume of scale.

Also 2.5 is my ‘worst’ card on Amex – to be fair it’s usually around 1.2 < 1.5 for most debit cards. Amex charges for me are around £1.5 to £3 a month! I’ve had bills for 19p in the past and they send an invoice and a seperate DD notice from France in the post! I cost them more than I make them just on postage.

I have an izettle in my taxi – it wouldn’t work in the shop as it’s to slow, unreliable and can’t link to the till. I pay for a propper epos card machine in the shop (aka supermarkets).

My contract with my current epos supplier is up at the end of the year, so I ‘should’ be able to get a better deal based on the increase in card use.

I’ll happily take card payment from anyone, but given the option I’ll take cash every time. It goes in my bank the same day, there are zero charges, I make a very very small fee for depositing the money, and it’s instant.

Cards I get charged for, it takes at least 3 days to go into my bank, I have to pay for the machine each month, I can’t just buy one (although there are service providers where I could).

He isn’t exaggerating much (re. Norway) – I have some cash in the house, but haven’t actually used it for a year and never routinely carry it. Most small transactions outside e.g. stuff at football matches, drinks etc. are account direct via a phone app called Vipps.

I do find it sad that this thread is so one sided. Its sad that the under 30s are so willing to throw away the choice of cash.

The digital age is very much like the industrial revolution, we can all see it happening, 50yrs time our lives will be completely different.

Its sad that the under 30s

I think you’ll find the average age on here is well over that, try nearer 50.

It’s a losing battle anyway, most of the public are happy for it to happen, many retailers and hospitality venues are happy for it to happen, HMRC won’t be objecting and nor will the banks. All you’ll have in favour of keeping it are a few luddities and a load of pressure groups lobbying for the luddites. The government of the day will pass some half hearted and convoluted legislation to keep cash just to look inclusive and cash will die.

Also, if we went completely cashless, I’d bet a crisp £20 note, the banks will suddenly put their charges up.

You’re late to the party, card charges to a big hike in 2018 and again in 2019. The business I work in were on pennies per transaction for debit card payments, it’s now a percentage. Credit cards went from 0.5% to around 2% or more for foreign payments.

The idea for a bank account for all is a good one but these never work as the charges are exorbitant for those on a low income (a bit like pre-pay fuel meters). The people who need them can’t afford a monthly fee for banking or charges for getting their money out to pay cash for a purchase.

I think you’ll find the average age on here is well over that, try nearer 50.

I know that 🙄, but judging by the pro reply’s (and my customers) it’s under 30s who don’t carry or use any cash.

Agree cash is completely dieing out and Covid has spread this up. But, for me at least, cash has massive advantages over card. Like I said earlier, if I were cash only id have thousands a year to reinvest in my buisness.

No, there should be a low fees for small businesses drive. Then we all get what we want.

Not really, by paying in cash your keeping 100% of that money local. Paying by card/phone/watch a percentage goes to the international conglomerates.

 judging by the pro reply’s (and my customers) it’s under 30s who don’t carry or use any cash.

I’m 62 and, as above, never carry cash. Hell, I rarely carry a wallet or card. I use my phone instead. Is happily see the max transaction limit increased.

Last used cash to buy some garlic from a corner shop on Christmas Day – had to make a big detour to find an ATM to get 20 quid. Now I am keeping the coins in my pocket to give to homeless people, who don’t accept Amex just yet.

never carry cash. Hell, I rarely carry a wallet or card. I use my phone instead. Is happily see the max transaction limit increased.

This, though I keep a 20 in my phone case, and my car has maybe 20 or 30 pound coins for car parks when hillwalking.

Only downside is forgetting to lift ID (driving licence) when doing screwfix click and collect.