Been thinking about this a lot lately, obviously cashless society has been talked about for years but it seems the Pandemic is bringing this forward. Ive noticed quite a few establishments with card only no cash stop the spread notices 🙄
Brought into sharp focus recently when i sold some of my vinyl. Bloke bought them for £270 paid in £10 notes. I put it on the table and thought jeez that looks a lot of money and maybe next time i “need” 🤔🙄something perhaps i should get that cash out first look at it then decide whether i actually need to make that purchase? Not really going to happen i guess such are the nature of impulse purchases.
Thing is if the cash alternative disappears and all transactions are done by card surely personal debt will increase massively?
Times ive seen people buying rounds of drinks waving their card not bothering with a receipt ( which a lot of places dont offer so i ask) a recipe for a massive financial hangover as well?
My mates theory is trouble with us we still think a £1 is a lot of money, hes already an OAP i shall be in November so maybe it is an age thing and my forum name is fitting. 🙄

 if the cash alternative disappears and all transactions are done by card surely personal debt will increase massively?

I’m not making that connection. The day can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned (though I can see why it’s not appropriate for all).

Almost 63 btw so I don’t think it’s purely an age thing.

I generally disagree. With cash, I take £100 out of a cash machine and it generally gets frittered away with no real idea where it’s gone.

Card transactions however get downloaded each month as a CSV file, a lookup table macro assigns a category to each transaction and a pivot table sorts it all out. Takes <10mins a month and I can see exactly where I’ve spent money each month for the last 5 or so years.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I used a cash machine. Certainly not since Covid.

I did have to write a cheque last week. Took me a while to find the cheque book and found it was issued 10 years ago. I think that’s 3 cheques out of it now.

The day can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned

That’s good as an affluent retiree.

God help anyone you know who’s homeless and can’t have/don’t want a bank account.

Bitcoin perhaps ?

You could have quoted my full post.

How ever they are mutually exclusive views tbh.

It’s a bit like saying I want a car free society…..so long as I can have MY car.

Yawn.

Slow day?

What’s the requirement for a cash free society that means it can’t come soon enough.

Where we are now means it works for all sections of society and jnfact those that choose not to accept cash are actually more of a pain to the wider section of society than those that accept only cash….

Having been down the road of heavy debt due to unchecked spending I can see where you’re coming from.

Making it easier to spend your money on a whim is a dangerous path for some people. It’s far too easy to lose track of all the little spends (£3 coffee in the morning, £2 snack at lunch, another coffee on the way home) and before you know it £50 has gone with very little to show for it. When I switched from card/cash to Google Pay on my phone I quickly noticed that it was far easier to spend small amounts, especially as I didn’t take my wallet to work so couldn’t spend anything before.

To use your night out analogy my technique was to take out a defined amount of cash that I was happy to spend and when it was gone the night was over. The visual of seeing the pile slowly go from a few notes to mainly coins to nothing kept my spending in check. There isn’t that connect with waving a card or your phone at a reader. It’s far too easy to lose track of the costs until your payment is either refused or you see your balance the next day.

It’s easy to forget that some people don’t have any self-control around spending money. just look at gambling and the issues that can cause for some people.

You seen Klarna both online and in store yet 😂

until recently it took at least 3 weeks for an online purchase to get to where i lived, so i’d been buying locally.

having moved out of the boonies, i made my first online purchase in about 4 years. i was surprised to see that you can buy pretty much anything with free credit by clicking a button in the checkout.

that can’t be good for personal debt.

It costs us a fortune to take your card payment.
When there is no cash it will cost YOU a fortune to make a card payment.

@zippykona out interest what do you get charged for taking a card payment. Are debit cards less than credit cards. I often wonder if using one over the other could save a business money.

The visual of seeing the pile slowly go from a few notes to mainly coins to nothing kept my spending in check.

This is also why casinos make you swap your real money for play tokens and why theme parks sell their own currency sometimes. Yeah technically you can change it back but for most people once they’ve “spent” it, they’ve accepted its gone

I did have to write a cheque last week. Took me a while to find the cheque book and found it was issued 10 years ago. I think that’s 3 cheques out of it now.

I have this about once a year when I have my car serviced. It’s apparently cheaper for the small garage I use to accept cheques rather than process card payments.

At the start of the school holidays my daughter had her nails done. Given that a lot of places have been card only due to Covid, the nail bar was cash only. Helps raise money laundering suspicions🤔

have this about once a year when I have my car serviced. It’s apparently cheaper for the small garage I use to accept cheques rather than process card payments.

Where as the old guy at my local garage* worked out that by the time he processed them all and got then paid in even using online systems at his assumed hourly rate

he was better off using a card machine as no further man hours were consumed once it was clicked……they also don’t tend to bounce.

By offering this he found he also by default got alot less cash to process – but will still take the cash. Win win for him

*Two ramps and an mot inspection pit/3 guys so small but fair turn over In a week

@stainypants
There’s a 1p transaction fee for us.
Debit is around .45% credit around .75%
Plus terminal rental ,plus a charge we have to pay for saying that we won’t be naughty.
We have a really good deal. Lots of other people are charged 4p per transaction and 2.5%.
Normally we have to pay £200 a month in fees ,probably double that in December.

I try to pay for everything by phone now. Have notifications turned on so that it reminds me of recent transactions and their value. Like reading your receipt 10 mins or so after you’ve left the cafe… not that I’ve done that for years. More digital tools to help people keep track of, and appreciate, what we are spending are probably needed as we move away for cash.

Where as the old guy at my local garage* worked out that by the time he processed them all and got then paid in even using online systems at his assumed hourly rate he was better off using a card machine

Sounds like a similarly sized outfit to the one I use, I strongly suspect my guy’s never fully priced it up. I’m still surprised the per transaction cost is lower for cheques than card though.

Semi related question… do drug dealers still rely on cash or do they use electronic transfers (and if so isn’t that easily tracked evidence)

Card transactions however get downloaded each month as a CSV file, a lookup table macro assigns a category to each transaction and a pivot table sorts it all out. Takes <10mins a month and I can see exactly where I’ve spent money each month for the last 5 or so years.

Lol that’s bonkers to me. I don’t care what’s gone where, I earn it, I spend it, the circle repeats each month.

Lol that’s bonkers to me. I don’t care what’s gone where, I earn it, I spend it, the circle repeats each month.

The voice of the entitled and tone-deaf.

The voice of the entitled

Lol I wish.

It’s a well known phenomena that people spend more and think less about what they spend when they can’t see the transaction, there are graphs somewhere, for some people it also leads to overspend on credit cards and a dependency on credit in general.
I’m old school cash in my head but like the convenience of contactless in shops, aversion to credit and save up, but if you don’t do credit you don’t need to save up cos you generally have it..or is that just being tight..same thing maybe.

I was shocked recently to hear that many people go to buy big expensive things like a car or washing machine, and have to check an app to see what they can afford to pay for it per month, this decides which one they can get, this to me would be handing control of my cash/freedom to buy stuff to my bank, stuff that, what is wrong with just having enough money to buy a thing?

Seems a lot of people are riding it hard to adjust to the change/progress. If only we still had shillings and pence eh,.

I was up in York a couple of days ago and went for a walk after seeing my customer. I bumped into a busker who wasn’t accepting cash ‘due to Covid’. Instead he wanted paying in either Bitcoin or Ethereum! Gimicky perhaps, but cashless society is well on its way. I think Visa and Mastercard are upping the limit of contactless to a £100 over the next few weeks….and Apple Pay is fine for anything below a grand.

Like a few on here, if i get cash out, it just evaporates and i don’t really know where it’s all gone!!

The £100 contactless limit will come in in October. That’s the “legal” limit, card companies/banks don’t have to raise their current £45 limit to the £100, they could go to £75 for example but it’s more than likely they’ll go to £100. Then each shop can have its own limit: £100 limit at a newsagents?

Both the Indian and Chinese takeaways in the village are still cash only, that’s just about the only time I “need” cash, so I’ll get £20 out, pay for the takeaway then over the next couple of weeks (we don’t do takeaways very often) will just use the rest on small transactions.

I really can’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque, not even sure where the chequebook is. I’ve had to bank a few, one of my regular jobs doesn’t have a decent internet connection – poor enough that banking sites crash – so he pays by cheque. The others just have my bank details and pay direct into that. Similarly for trades working on the house: “here’s my card with bank details”

It’s been a bit of a subconscious switch TBH, I’ve certainly not done it deliberately but nor have I fought against it. I’m 62 BTW so not an age thing.

I think cash is obsolete, we just haven’t accepted it yet. As a country we should do what Sweden has done and have a proper plan for getting everyone cashless, leaving no one behind.

Otherwise we’ll just go cashless by accident and end up disadvantaging a whole chunk of poorer society even more (but then that is very much the British way).

Performers at the Fringe had card readers, QR codes to scan or took cash.

Excellent cafe near me won’t take card payments less than £10. Its what the emergency tenner in my ride pack is for!

I don’t even carry cards anymore, just my iPhone with a £20 note in the case for the rare occasions when the card readers are down or a random cafe is cash only. Use it about once a year!

The tooth fairy is going to struggle. We had a blind panic last week trying to find a £2 coin, failed, and had to settle for a £1 coin that serves as a trolley token. Child not happy as going rate is £2 plus.

Not sure a note saying the tooth fairy has transferred you some bitcoin will be the same for a child as a big shiny coin.

@Andy_Sweet have a vague memory of reading about how dealers were taking card payments (using fintechs like square).

I think cash is obsolete, we just haven’t accepted it yet.

No, it isn’t. Yesterday I had to withdraw cash from a machine in order to buy something, actually fish and chips because the nearest chippy only takes cash, but also some things in town today, because my bank detected fraudulent activity on my debit card on Thursday and have cancelled my card; because it’s a bank holiday, my new card won’t be dispatched until Tuesday, so I won’t have the means to buy fuel for my car, to get to work, or food to eat, unless I use cash, and my only easy source of cash is my building society account, which I can transfer money to from my bank account.
And before anyone jumps in and says use a credit card, I don’t have one, and won’t have one – I got into too much trouble when I had one, and had it cut up by my account manager years ago.

There are cash points everywhere, that is all you need, the rest can be cashless.

It’s just another step of many for money, bank notes were invented as a guarantee of payment, a ‘note’ to pay the lender, an official iou from the bank as it were, meaning the real money could stay in the bank and you didn’t need to carry lumps of gold around…we just decided it was going to be the ‘real’ thing, it became currency, the original thing no longer exists, we trade hours of work for x which is sent to the bank, and the bank lets you exchange it..without it ever existing in real form, it’s actually very strange when you think about it.

Now we can take the next step and just have nothing at all in circulation, security of that is the only issue I have, we enter an age where people can access your entire account with a machine for the first time, and it’s clear no one is particularly worried about that.

All fine and dandy till there’s a power cut.

Plenty of places I’ve paid by phone where the payment device was also working without mains power. Power cuts can be designed around. And physical cards aren’t the real replacement for cash either, just a stepping stone that people find easier to understand than what we’ll end up with very soon.

I’ve never used my mobile to make a payment. I don’t use my mobile for online banking. Saying that, it’s become quite rare that I use cash. Chip shop today, barber the other week. But always card in the supermarket, or pay online and collect/deliver. Agree with others, I don’t want to have too much convenience to make purchases. As I’ve got older obviously gained some self discipline around money, but still feel more comfortable with a few small safeguards to delay any impulsive decisions on what I ‘really really need right now’.

All fine and dandy till there’s a power cut.

In Tesco?