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China's Cashless Economy Threatens To Leave Its Elderly -- and Their Money -- Behind (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: With his cellphone in one hand, and two wooden meditation balls in the other, Zhang Siqi queued up alongside throngs of fellow retirees that make up the morning rush at a small Beijing grocery store. Zhang, a Beijing native, then opened the WeChat mobile pay tab on his phone and scanned it at the automatic register to pay for some fruit and a pack of cigarettes with a savviness that belied his age.
That cutting-edge payment method is rapidly becoming so common in Beijing and other large cities that experts have begun referring to the Chinese capital as a prototype of the futuristic cashless society. In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported, far outstripping the US. While Zhang has been using WeChat social media and mobile pay functions for a few years now, the 63-year-old knows not every Chinese senior citizen is equally adept.
"Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps," he said, pocketing his phone with his right hand, and rolling the wooden meditation balls with his left. Those issues were brought into sharp focus recently by a viral video of an older Chinese patron in northern China arguing with the staff at the checkout of a supermarket in northern China over how to pay for a bag of grapes -- the staff told him he needed to pay by app, but eventually relented and allowed him to pay by cash. A slew of viewers expressed sympathy for the demoralized customer, including consultant Matthew Brennan, who writes about China's ever-evolving tech scene.
That cutting-edge payment method is rapidly becoming so common in Beijing and other large cities that experts have begun referring to the Chinese capital as a prototype of the futuristic cashless society. In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported, far outstripping the US. While Zhang has been using WeChat social media and mobile pay functions for a few years now, the 63-year-old knows not every Chinese senior citizen is equally adept.
"Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps," he said, pocketing his phone with his right hand, and rolling the wooden meditation balls with his left. Those issues were brought into sharp focus recently by a viral video of an older Chinese patron in northern China arguing with the staff at the checkout of a supermarket in northern China over how to pay for a bag of grapes -- the staff told him he needed to pay by app, but eventually relented and allowed him to pay by cash. A slew of viewers expressed sympathy for the demoralized customer, including consultant Matthew Brennan, who writes about China's ever-evolving tech scene.
Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps
Most of them don't have a poor memory and are perfectly capable of learning new technology. Most of them just don't want to learn something new and are comfortable with old ways of doing things. As such I tend to react skeptically when older folks claim they can't handle the technology. Sometimes it's true but more often it's just laziness or disinterest.
My father is old enough to collect social security. He's a smart man and worked as an engineer and machinist for 30 years. But he's intimidated by computers and in many cases isn't willing to put in the work necessary to learn about how to do something on his laptop or smartphone. I've explained simple tasks to him repeatedly that he is more than smart enough and capable enough to learn and retain. The only explanation for why is that he isn't really interested in learning and it's easier to just ask me.
Around 2008, one of my cousins who is roughly my age was whining that she couldn't keep up with all this social networking technology because "we didn't grow up with this". I pointed out that A) she has multiple degrees and is more than capable enough of figuring it out, B) Facebook had only been around a short time so nobody had grown up with it and yet millions had figured it out and C) one does not need to grow up with a technology to understand and master it - to claim otherwise is the most pathetic of excuses.
YES! I want to be tracked in everything I do. All Americans should be desiring and willing to be tracked like this! It makes life so much easier and remember what that great Nazi spokesman Joseph Goebbels said, 'If you have nothing to hide, you ave nothing to fear!'.
instead of the implications of government access to the data of trillions of dollars of transactions Chinese "citizens" make.
From the package of grapes, to the pregnancy tests, foreign purchases... everything purchased will be categorized, and probably calculated into your social media scores.
Not a bit terrifying?
Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
...someone will ALWAYS figure out how to take money from you. This is the biggest non-problem on the planet.
It isn't just the elderly who will have problems in a cashless society. Authoritarian governments LOVE cashless payments as it allows them to keep tabs on what everybody is buying and selling. "Sorry, you've bought too much alcohol this month, time for re-education camp." "You bought a ski mask but no skis? You must be planning a robbery (or worse, a protest)!"
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
CASHLESS, means EVERYTHING you purchase, EVERYTHING you earn is noted by "the government". Once this globe falls into the one world order, with EVERYTHING controlled by the imperial United Nations (or whatever they call it), ANYTHING you attempt to purchase, will be approved or denied by the global rulers. Hard currency, be it gold, barter or whatever, keep the governments nose OUT of your business. Cashless is touted now as "secure & convenient" which is just a ruse to get you to give up more of your privacy.
Most "problems" I see on the Internet are. Clickbait. Meanwhile, real problems get ignored because they are too complicated for people to grasp in a headline.
If there ever was a globalist banker scheme, this would be it.
Cash is king.
From the package of grapes, to the pregnancy tests, foreign purchases... everything purchased will be categorized, and probably calculated into your social media scores.
Not a bit terrifying?
The terrifying bit is when the government limits your ability to buy food based on your social credit score. Criticize the government? Let's see how you do without food for a month.
They already do this with access to public transport, which is many people's only way of getting to work.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not necessarily -- (at least in the US/Europe), you can have the app connected to a credit card, not a bank account. So it's still the banksters' money.
Dont worry. From the oppressed and completely enslaved population, there will be a man with fiercely independent spirit (with a decent looking face and hunky body) who will put together a rag tag band of rebels, two pretty females, one who will eventually sacrifice herself for the cause, and few more men and women with expressive faces and body language, who will take on the mighty and bring it all crashing down, typically in 85 minutes, with 5 minutes to spare for the credits and the blooper reel.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Credit cards charge a fee that raises the price of everything you buy. Pay-by-app, at least for WeChat-pay and Ali-Pay, charges no fee.
Anyone who can't remember to charge their phone, is just as likely to forget or lose their CC.
These payment systems can use either Wifi or the cellular network. Both are very reliable in China.
CC fraud is a huge problem. Pay-by-app fraud is nearly nonexistent.
Peer-to-peer payments are easy with the apps. Impossible with CCs.
In the West, it is the banks that keeps tabs on you.
They don't like cash because they can't make a profit on it.
If they don't like you, you get your bank account frozen.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Never mind how much they had contributed to society during their life time.
You know who else thought that the elderly and "unfit" were a drain on society and should be put to death? The Nazis. I'm not trying to Godwin's law you, just stating facts.
Goebbles ordered propaganda movies in an attempt to change public opinion in favour of "euthanasia".
Check out one example: Ich Klage An. After the war, the cast and crew were put on trial at Nurnberg charged with crimes against humanity
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
You do know that the ability to learn and retain new information slowly fades as you get older and the brain gets more and more set in its ways, right?
Certainly. That doesn't mean people become blithering idiots the moment they turn 60. Just because they aren't at the peak of their mental abilities doesn't mean they are incapable of learning anything new.
That's why it's a lot easier for kids to learn a second language than it is for adults.
Learning how to send an email or use a digital payment system is a FAR cry from learning an entire new language. Adults are routinely better at absorbing new material than children are. I defy you to find a 10 year old who could handle the many and various responsibilities and unexpected problems that come with my job.
At some point the difficulty of learning something over the perceived benefit of having learned it leads to an equation where people go, "Fuck it, I'm too old for this shit."
That's a fancy way of saying exactly my point. They can't be bothered to learn so they don't try. It has NOTHING to do with their actual capacity to learn in the vast majority of cases.
Maybe your cousin didn't WANT to use the social media crap, and was basically saying: call me, text me, or fuck the fuck off.
My cousin's complaints had nothing to do with me. She was complaining because she had to learn something new so she could follow her children's exploits on Facebook and elsewhere. She was pretending incompetence when in fact the reality was that she lacked interest.
Many of us spent a long time learning to do something a certain way, and are unwilling to just throw all that time and effort away because somebody decided they had a better way that really is no better, just different.
First off please educate yourself about the sunk cost fallacy. Second, just because you think it isn't any better does not mean your opinion is correct or widely shared. Digital payments have clear, measurable, and easily understood advantages. Yes they have disadvantages too. Your comfort with a different way of doing something is a good approximation of irrelevant if the majority of people see advantage in using a new technology.
"In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported...". China's nominal GDP is $12.24 trillion. And the statistic claims $15 trillion was made in Mobile payments! Gas.
I do this in Canada for a couple of years now, pay everything with my phone: gas, groceries, drug stores, dollar store, hardware store, costco, corner store, name it. The only stores I know that don't accept pay pass are Wal-Mart and Michaels, in Canada.
In the USA it is pretty retarted, maybe they are 40 years late compared to Europe. There is a lot of place in the USA where you still use your magnetic strip, or that even if you use a chip+PIN or pay pass, the cashier still asks for your signature, they don't know how to handle technology. Last year I paid in a CVS with my phone and the old lady cashier was speechless. In a Pizza Hut when I wanted to pay with my phone the cashier had to ask to the manager if they accepted it and how to do it (yes, it worked). I used a chip card in the 80s in France, more than 40 years ago, go figure...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Already, there are restaurants in places like New York City that won't accept cash. They demand debit cards, credit cards or something like Apple or Android Pay, only. Their reasoning is an interest in reducing crime. (You won't get very far trying to wave a gun at them and demanding all the cash in the register.) I'm sure, secondarily, there's the advantage of fewer errors from employees making incorrect change or accidentally accepting counterfeit bills. And obviously, it saves some of the hassle of making sure you have enough change in the register, so you don't run out of $1's or quarters or what have you.
But most definitely, all of these cashless payment options trade the convenience for ability to track your purchasing habits. And if you're in the habit of buying relatively expensive goods, second-hand, it means the risk that government will start using that information at tax time to challenge your returns and any requests for refunds. "You state, here, that you only earned $X,XXX this year, Mr. Jones -- yet we see where somehow, you managed to spend X% of your total income on performance parts for your truck and new computers from sellers on Craigslist. That math seems a bit questionable, so we've decided to do a full audit. Remember, if you made that money on the side selling illegal drugs, you still owe the state and Federal tax on the proceeds."
are wise enough not to trust an " app " ( which has public or private permissions to access who knows what on your phone ) which runs on an untrustworthy platform ( smartphone ) which has the means to access a bank account or credit card in your name.
Perhaps they have enough wisdom to see what sort of hard-on the Chinese Government gets from being able to track / watch every single financial transaction in real time. Couple this with their much touted " Social Scoring System " and you can see where this can go full stupid rather quickly.
I am curious what happens when your phone gets hacked. Or damaged. Or the power is out. Network is down somewhere along the path. etc. etc.
( Though I'm pretty sure if the Internet was down for more than a few days, most of the younger crowd would probably leap off the nearest cliff )
Bottom line: While there exists very little trust that your Government ( whichever one it may be ) is looking out for your best interests, the same can be said for app developers and / or those who build the hardware and OS the smartphones use. Leave anything life critical off your phone unless you have no problems with the data it contains being under a microscope at all times.
Nazis did euthanasia on the mentally retarded, and old people are basically retards, I guess you're saying?
You're doing a classic Godwin.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Asian societies are still strongly influenced by Confucianism, which includes obedience to authority. This includes the head of your family, those older than you, superiors at work, and the government (which helps explain a lot of the social weirdness you see if you enjoy watching anime). I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the remaining Communist governments are in Asia (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos; Cuba is the lone exception). The people there are just less likely to rebel against government authority.
Respect for your elders is also part of it, So yeah it makes perfect sense that they'd worry about how it inconveniences the elderly, while thinking little about the consequences for government surveillance.
There will also probably be more divergence. I know a lot of places that are cash-only, esp when it comes to food, and that seems to be on the rise again. Cashless is just so fiddly and expensive.
To the Chinese government, their citizens are just 'work units'. If they could replace them all with robots, they would; you see that they're treated more and more like robots, so my claim is not hard to imagine. The elderly are not useful as worker-drones anymore, so why should they care if they live or die? More likely they want anyone past the age of being useful workers to just quietly die. Bonus points for truth and wisdom of elders not being passed on to subsequent generations; the State would much rather have no opposing viewpoints clouding the minds of the next generation of worker-drones; their programming must not be corrupted by ideas like 'freedom', 'privacy', 'free speech', 'democracy', and so on.
No doubt the pro-China trolls will come out the woodwork now to try to piss me off, maybe mod me down into the sub-basement of Slashdot, but you won't, and you can't rationally defend a shitty government like China has, not even if you're part of the Chinese government. They're assholes, plain and simple, and I feel sympathy and pity for the citizens of China, especially the newest generation, who will likely never understand that what they endure is wrong.
WeChat Pay and Alipay both charge once you get above a relatively low limit (1000 RMB). Both also sit on your funds for 7 to 14 days, longer than Visa or Mastercard, or even UnionPay or Peony.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
Honestly, they don't need to. Americans think electronic payments cost 2-3% like VISA, MasterCard, AmEx etc. charge because they bake in fraud protection, insurance, credit, kickbacks etc. and a solid profit margin but in reality an plain debit electronic transaction is super cheap. Here in Norway the national system (BankAxept) charges $0.015 to $0.03 per transaction depending on unit volume. And no, I don't mean percent I mean $15-30 per 1000 sales. All companies that pay their taxes lose money on cash handling, they want electronic payments and many high value stores and services would like to go cashless but so far the law doesn't let them. Even in the large grocery chains it's now only around 11% cash and since almost everybody pays bills online and pay electronic shopping online cash is now only 3% of the white economy.
A mobile pay solution "Vipps" has taken a massive chunk of the individual-to-individual market since up to ~$600 there's no fee at all and you only need their phone number. Only 1% of the population say they don't use any electronic payment cards at all. In short, cash is dying all on its own and really the only strong argument that seems to stick is preparedness, what would you do if you go cashless and the payment solutions are down. That and a minority of the elderly, but really we can't push those ahead of us much longer. And there's a strong lobby who'd like us to go cashless too, if we weren't already running in that direction...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Anyone who can't remember to charge their phone, is just as likely to forget or lose their CC.
No they are not because paying by phone requires two things :-
1) To charge the phone beforehand
2) To take the phone with you
OTOH paying by credit card requires only one thing :-
1) To take the card with you
Moreover, I have the habit of checking by feel when I leave the house that my card wallet and phone are in my pocket. But I can't check the state of charge of my phone that way, and in any case even if I look at it, the little battery state icon on my phone goes from full to empty quite suddenly.
The story told in the article is not a statistic we can based ourselves when considering the ability of the elderly. Just saying. Nice piece though.
Not much different then the only information services company in your area cuts you off so you can't buy groceries, though I guess being a company makes it fine as their freedom is more important then you eating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Man, WTF? Does your ISP send you at gunpoint to a forced labor camp? Does it have mobile execution vans for its convenience? Can it actually in any way stop you from buying groceries? Your false equivalence is such obvious BS. (Plus, you know there are also big companies in China complicit in this shit, right? It's not an either-or.)
OK, I'm assuming you're just an idiot, but maybe I've got the wrong end of this: even though because you're posting with a low UID, you could still be working for the Chinese government. It's not like a Slashdot account is hard to hack.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's the direction that we seem to be going. Sure the Chinese are leading, but there are totalitarians in every country and they're usually successful, due to not giving a shit about others. As for how far companies can go, research the E. India Company or some of the companies in 19th century America, who did work with the government to have camps, though not like the prison industry has now, and didn't care about executing people who were in their way or disobedient. Of course these people were usually the wrong stock, natives in the way or black people who didn't appreciate being "volunteered" to labor.
Authoritarians are authoritarians, no matter what they say, and I'd prefer to avoid giving them too much power as there are too many examples in history of things going really bad, often with good intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They'd never allow it, they don't want any of the 1.4 billion to think there's any escape. If they had their way, I'm sure, they'd make everyone believe there is no life or world outside Chinese borders, only death, just to make them believe there's no choice other than to be good little automatons.
In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments
Redo you calculation with the countries population in 2017 of 1.386 billion
That's over a trillion more than the total retail sales in USA. Not the biggest economy anymore.
That's just mobile spending, not cash, debit, or credit cards
I can see in the not-so-distant future insurance companies dinging people with higher premiums for purchases they deem "inappropriate". Screw the system. Likewise, I get penalized at work for not getting the annual physical, where they want to see blood panel, weight/height/BMI, and diabestes and cholesterol panels. I refuse out of principle, and my premiums are $50 month higher. It's all about control and I simply will not play the game unless and until it is illegal to do so, and even then there will be ways around it.
As if the socialized version would be any different? It still costs money for daddy government to pay for all your diabestes panels, people just think it's free because they're economically illiterate. You think that just because it's "teh people" paying your bills that no one is going to think about cost savings? LMAO.
Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
As I frequently say, obsolete technology does not need to be banned. When the powers that be are trying to stomp out the old ways by force, you know whatever excuses they're using are bullshit.
WTF !!! I don't know any 60 year olds who aren't 'tech savvy'. Good grief
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.