So will people have to rent debit machines when hosting garage/yard sales in this cashless society?
Or Paypal. Or swipe the buyer's credit card on your tablet or even phone. Or if you want to go
really old school, you could take a personal check. That's not cash. How long have personal checks been around for now?
Don't trust personal checks? I don't blame you. I don't like those either. Money orders are probably safer...and those are also not cash, and how long have those been around for?
I don't understand why some folks think that cashless commerce is somehow new. Personal checks go back at least as far as the Roman Empire. They've existed in the US for...well, pretty much since the start. And do you know why some of those colonists were issuing and accepting the contemporary equivalent of personal checks?
Because they were more convenient than cash.
Oh, electronic payments with your zombie phones? Sure, you want 25 cents for this? I'll send a quarter to your e-mail right now.....
Sound stupid?
Very. What does one buy for $0.25 these days?
Now look at everyone tapping their chips or phones. Groomed perfectly by the financial institutions.
Groomed for what?
"We pay for everything on our credit card so that we get the points reward." Yeah, the banks and credit companies are making boatloads of money!
And what does that cost the person using the credit card? We already know that they get the points and rewards, but what does it actually cost them, assuming that they pay their balance off in full each month?
If they don't enter it into the till correctly, then they have no idea as they cannot add simple math.
Ironically, cashiers dealing with cash are probably the last remaining people in the developed world that have an actual need to know how to do simple math. (And really, they shouldn't. The register ought to be doing that for them.) I've argued before, and will argue again, that it should be dropped from the curriculum in public school. It's an obsolete skill for anyone other than a specialist.
If they force me to get a zombie phone to pay for everything, then I'm off to live in the woods AGAIN! Screw this world!!!!
There is always a certain amount of irony involved when someone gets on the internet and threatens to drop off the grid. (Again.)
No, no, no. That's what they want you to think.
The main reason they want a cashless society is because they want to track and TAX everything you do. Cash makes it easy for you to pay me, face to face, without Uncle Sam getting his cut. Not so with electronic methods of money transfer.
They, as in the banks, or they, as in Uncle Sam? Because Uncle Sam is actually all right with cash. He really wants you to start using dollar coins in fact, as it would save him a lot of money if we all started doing so. But we refused, and now he's sad.
Seriously. If you love cash and you love America and you love metal detecting, start using those damned $1 coins and get everyone that you know to start using them too. The government has your back on this.
Well the penny has been gone for years now in Canada.
And good riddance. (To the Canadian penny, not to Canada. Although BC has been pissing us off lately. If you could convince them to put out their fires and stop making Seattle look like Beijing, that would be great.)