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Predicting a Future Free of Dollar Bills
An anonymous reader writes with this story about how a cashless society might work and how far-off in the future it is. "...We're not there yet, but a cashless society is not as fanciful as it seems. Recent research suggests that many believe we will stop using notes and coins altogether in the not-too-distant future. New payments technologies are rapidly transforming our lives. Today in the U.S., 66 percent of all point-of-sale transactions are done with plastic, while in the U.K. it's just under half. But while a truly cashless society is some time away yet, there is raft of groundbreaking technologies that will make cash a mere supporting act in the near future."
Good luck everybody
...that they know about.....are done with plastic.
Why would you ever want a cashless society? Cash is one option you have. Taking it out removes an option and therefore freedom.
As long as there is a demand for illegal drugs, there will be a need for cash. Lots of cash. Dealers don't take plastic.
As someone who has had a recent issue with a certain major bank(they closed the account and sent cashiers checks to me for the balance. Waiting 2-3 days without money wasn't pleasant)...I will never go cashless. Relying on these financial institutions for every transaction is something I will not trust. I won't get into the whole NSA/FBI/etc. potential tracking of all my purchases.
The other point of view is that cash is needed because the government is still all in our business. Get the government out of the morality game and the cash will more or less disappear on its own. In that way, cash usage is a proxy for government oppression.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Let's see the future free from pennies, first.
But they could always take bitcoin, paypal dead-drops, or many other forms of e-payment.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
A butcher near me already has http://canningsfreerangebutche...
While cashless might make sense to a middle class with easy access to technology and banks, there is a significant percentage of the population does not have access to such things and they probably will not any time soon. As much as 10% of the US population has no bank access, no SS ID, no IDs of any type, etc.
Last week I swiped my card at a gas station pump before noticing the tamper proof seals had been broken. I have replaced the card, but while waiting for the new card I used cash. You tend to conserve more money when it is cold, hard cash instead of of just swiping a card. Less surface area for compromise as well.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
In Canada we no longer have dollar bills. We have dollar coins. We also got rid of the penny.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
So you are the reason that a lot of stores have a minimum charge amount for credit / debit charges. The transaction fees charged to merchants are ridiculous and so are ATM fees. Until these fees are reduced, you will never see a truly cashless society. And that doesn't include those that have less trust of banks than they do of governments.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
"Cashless" is also a giant vacuum sucking service fees back to the banks and so on. Retailers pay a certain amount per transaction to a payment processor, even if you the customer don't pay directly. Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
Just imagine how much money you would have if you got a penny for every transaction conducted in every North American Wal-mart for just one day -- you could retire several times over and still afford fuel for your yachts!
Are we really in that much of a hurry to keep giving more money to the banks?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I've had it several times in my life where my debit and credit card stopped working because of a glitch. Those few times if I didn't have cash on me, I would have been screwed because I got up-front services, like going out to eat or gas or I had to pay my electric bill that day or get cut off. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, I need a way to keep living.
1. Privacy is more important to me than convenience. I like the idea that I can go into a store and buy something without someone making a recording of it and tying it to me.
2. The issue isn't to make the dollar go away, or even the penny go away. The issue is to fix the inflation.
Also needed if you happen to piss of the government and they order your accounts frozen. Then you starve unless you have cash. Or friends. Who are willing to risk "supporting a terrorist".
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
This is going to be disastrous if we remove stripper money.
... Slap
Where should I swipe my card miss?
Swipes
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"Lots of people think it will happen" means about nothing. People are HORRIBLY bad at predicting future trends. More so en-mass.
What people say they want and what they really want (and demonstrate by doing) are pretty much unrelated. So even if people SAY they want cashless, I doubt they'll actually vote that way when the rubber hits the road.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Most criminals would no longer be able to transact business, as they operate in a cash system.
The biggest criminals run banks... or governments
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is a non-trivial fee associated with cash too. Cash requires labor to move/protect it, can go "missing" much more easily than credit card transactions etc. Cards are probably still more expensive, but not by as much as you may think.
Monstar L
the fiat, which can crash at any moment
The currency or the car?
(In before "yes".)
Cashless only works if the poor can get bank accounts without having to pay hefty fees if they can even qualify at all.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Credit card companies in the US are always double-dipping, charging processing fees to the merchants and collecting interest from cardholders.
Often, yes. Always, no. I've had three credit cards. None of them charge any interest because I pay in full each month with an ACH transfer from my checking account.
In America, most stores won't take your card unless you plan to spend less than a pittance. Most stores will deny you if your transaction isn't 5-10$
Not sure what backwards part of America that post came from, but I can tell you for certain that it's absolutely false in every part of America that I'm aware of. I use my debit card everywhere, for everything, including buying a single item at a dollar store if that's all I want to buy. No one has ever once even blinked. $1 at the Dollar Store, $3 at the fast-food joint, whatever, everyone's happy to take my business. I stopped using cash for anything at all over a decade ago, and the only people who don't want my card are the government -- they would rather I write a check for my driver's license renewal or whatever (which is funny, no one else will accept a check anymore around here).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Are we assuming all transactions humans do are with merchants?
Naive as hell !
Crappy list of examples, I'm sure there are hundreds of examples: 1) What about if I want to buy your [insert bike or computer or whatever]? 2) Baby sitter? 3) Kid's allowance? 4) Pay some kid kid to mow yard. 5) Underground transactions (illegal stuff)
The importance of cash will continue to decline with transactions with merchants, but it will never remotely approach "cashless".
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Pre-paid debit card.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Banks love you using plastic. They tax every transaction. Paying with plastic costs you at least 2.5% and as much as 5% extra because the merchants must build that into the price to pay the banks for the credit card transactions. This is a hidden inflation. A hidden tax.
Banks also like it because they can collect data on your behavior and that is a salable product which makes them more money.
One of my clients made me get it to get paid, their accounting department was paying net 90 days and required all kinds of crazy insurance to get me paid through them. So paying with the department credit card was just easier. So when I setup the credit card account, they told me it would cost me 4.0%. Every month new and mysterious (to my account rep.) charges would show up: a fraction of a percent here, fixed fees there. He could never give me an explanation of what they all were, and they weren't consistent from what I could tell. I told them that those charges were ok with me as I was passing that along to my client, but it was hard to do that when I didn't know what I would expect (I was running around $10K a month through it for some other part time contractors and equipment). When the project was over, I couldn't cancel that account fast enough.
So I perfectly understand why some stores have a minimum charge or won't take credit at all, it's a big hassle and cost.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
The electrical grid is anything but reliable.
It's simply unacceptable to say, that if the power goes out, then we're screwed and can no longer trade.
We need the ability to trade regardless of operating on or off the grid, and plastic or cashless methods can't do that.
"The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. "
"The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
Of course it does. But there's not much I as an individual can do about it. So, actually this is an INCENTIVE for consumers to use credit cards, since at least with my card I can get a percentage back in whatever form of rewards (whereas cash only customers will just lose all of it). The only place where I have an incentive to pay cash is when merchants charge different prices for cash vs. credit, and there I generally would pay cash. (Of course, this assumes you never carry a balance on your card... and why would you?)
In theory electronic cash, such as bitcoins, could still allow anonymous transactions.
The other other point of view is that a uniform means of economic exchange with no additional cost is public service that the government should be doing.
I agree that a common currency is a core government concern. I wasn't advocating that the government should be out of the currency business, just positing that cash usage probably has some correlation to government's interaction with your daily life. There are some pretty large cash payments taking place to avoid taxes, or because the government makes sure it is hard to use credit cards for your illegal transaction.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Cashless" is also a giant vacuum sucking service fees back to the banks and so on. Retailers pay a certain amount per transaction to a payment processor, even if you the customer don't pay directly. Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
THIS. I can't believe everyone is so supportive of a cashless society when cash is the only transaction-free method of payment (also anonymous). Paying 3-5 percent convenience charge simply to not use cash boggles my mind. I often ask for a cash discount on large purchases and usually the merchant is quite eager.
Cash is king.
If a tampered vending machine takes my cash, it's my word against theirs that it's my money they stole.
If they use my credit card details, I get the money back. The insurance for that is paid by the merchant fees. There is no cash insurance.
Writing the mag strip to a new card won't work for long anyway, since every time I put my card in an ATM machine, the mag strip is re-written.
You can't reuse a chip or contactless authorisation, they're both one time only.
Tell me again how cash in a vending machine is safer?
A cashless society is doomed to serfs and kings.
Whenever the kings want more, they raise the prices by adding fees.
Serfs will have no say in the matter.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
From Alien: Resurrection:
GEN. PEREZ: Elgyn, these were very, very hard to come by. *slides a stack of cash to Elgyn*
ELGYN: So was our cargo. You're, uh...not about to plead poverty on me, are you, General?
GEN. PEREZ: No. Just saying very few people deal in cash nowadays.
ELGYN: Just the ones don't like to keep business records. Yourself, for example.
[End Of Line]
Some private company would invent something to replace it.
There are just too many microtransactions on too many levels to totally replace cash.
You wanna know a really cool feature of cash? If the merchant from whom I buy something with cash gets robbed/hacked after I leave, I don't lose the rest of my cash. It's pretty nifty.
Ex. power blackouts like NY had last year, or ~15 years ago when New England and Ontario had a power outage for a couple days. Most things will shutdown anyways in those scenarios but still are businesses really not going to want to be able to sell things because their card reader isn't working? Or how about your wallet gets stolen, credit card gets hacked etc? With cash you might/likely have some around the house. How many people have a spare copy of their bank card and credit card and will it work once you report the other one as missing? What you are just going to not buy anything for 3-5 days while you wait for another one?
So why replace it with banks that launder money for terrorists and drug cartels and dodge taxes? Normal human beings do need to not pay what are effectively taxes to corporations. If they knew how much the credit cards were taking on the merchant side (that shows up in their prices), they might clamor to pay cash more often.
You let your child travel to the convenience store without adult supervision, without even a phone just in case? You child abuser, you.
Fucking NAZI. When I was growing up, all the kids wandered the neighbourhood without adult supervision until dusk and we turned out just fine. We also walked to the neighbourhood corner store for candy. Namby-pamby fascists like you are what is ruining society. We did not have cell phones either.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
You wanna know a really cool feature of credit cards? If you get mugged after you leave the store, you don't lose any of your money when you cancel the card and dispute any transactions.
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So you are the reason that a lot of stores have a minimum charge amount for credit / debit charges. The transaction fees charged to merchants are ridiculous and so are ATM fees. Until these fees are reduced, you will never see a truly cashless society. And that doesn't include those that have less trust of banks than they do of governments.
Why blame the man working within the system for charges applied by someone completely different? Either the merchant should be happy to absorb the transaction cost, the merchant should specify the minimum cost, or the bank shouldn't charge the fees. But it most definitely is NOT the fault of the person simply buying something.
Now let's flip the thing around. For the few cents per transaction that end up going to the banks for small purchases how much could be potentially saved by not tallying up the register, not storing float offsite or managing a safe, not having to train staff to manage cash securely, not having to bank your earnings at the end of the day (that's a good expensive one there), and above all when the cash register disagrees with the paperwork not spending an hour trying to figure out where the money went.
There is a cost of doing business in cash. You just don't see it and point to credit fees instead. I for one pay an accountant to do my taxes because he's faster and cheaper than the time I'd spend doing it, so why not pay a bank to manage the money (if we went cashless).