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USA Today Tech Columnist: Millennials Will Live To See a Cashless World (usatoday.com)
"I haven't had a nickel, dime, quarter or penny in my pocket for two years," writes USA Today tech columnist Jefferson Graham, adding "Why bother? We're now living in what's quickly becoming a cashless society, where credit cards or electronic payments on your phone rule."
His column is addressed to the mayor of Philadelphia, who this week signed a bill that bans cashless stores. Mr. Mayor. It's happening all over the world, and not just from Amazon. We are going cashless. Maybe not in your lifetime, but certainly for millennials. Banks and credit card companies want this to curb the costs of handling green. Selected merchants are into it now... USA Today's Charisse Jones discovered that cash purchases were down to 30 percent of all retail transactions as of last year compared to 40 percent in 2012. Millennials, she noted here this week, are saying no to cash, with 21 percent of those 23- to 34 years old saying that most of their transactions were in cash in 2016....
Mobile pay is still a sliver of overall retail sales, but it's definitely on the rise. Target, a long holdout, just added Apple Pay to one of its options, following in the footsteps of Best Buy, CVS, Costco and other retail giants who now accept payment via iPhone. The big, lone holdout right now is Walmart, the No. 1 retailer. It does have its own mobile pay app, that links bank payments to QR codes. And Mr. Mayor, good news for you. Walmart still accepts cash, too.
But for how long?
His column is addressed to the mayor of Philadelphia, who this week signed a bill that bans cashless stores. Mr. Mayor. It's happening all over the world, and not just from Amazon. We are going cashless. Maybe not in your lifetime, but certainly for millennials. Banks and credit card companies want this to curb the costs of handling green. Selected merchants are into it now... USA Today's Charisse Jones discovered that cash purchases were down to 30 percent of all retail transactions as of last year compared to 40 percent in 2012. Millennials, she noted here this week, are saying no to cash, with 21 percent of those 23- to 34 years old saying that most of their transactions were in cash in 2016....
Mobile pay is still a sliver of overall retail sales, but it's definitely on the rise. Target, a long holdout, just added Apple Pay to one of its options, following in the footsteps of Best Buy, CVS, Costco and other retail giants who now accept payment via iPhone. The big, lone holdout right now is Walmart, the No. 1 retailer. It does have its own mobile pay app, that links bank payments to QR codes. And Mr. Mayor, good news for you. Walmart still accepts cash, too.
But for how long?
Unlike this crappy columnist I am a millennial with a good paying job with no debt and money in my pocket.
I go out of my way to use cash and avoid credit cards.
The day we have a cashless society is the day the cloud atlas economy takes hold. (i.e you are required to spend a certain amount of money a week on consumption and probably negative interest rates and financial fees as punishment if you don't)
That or the world will migrate to Bitcoin I suppose...
Everyone only sees the world they want to see. I became a landlord a few years ago. It opened my eyes to the amount and types of people who don't or can't get debit or credit cards and that's ignoring all of the people who can't handling having a credit line. I would have otherwise never learned this type of information about people and would have continually falsely believed people had access to the same resources I had. How many random people do you go around asking about their financial history?
The metric they're measuring is total cash transactions. That's doesn't include enough information to be useful. Is that 30% of the population only using cash or 1% only using cash and 29% sometimes using it? Perhaps that 70% are only buying a couple things at a time over and over where as the 30% cash purchases are buying two weeks worth of items at a time. Perhaps the majority of the cashless transaction are in cities. Etc... People will fill in the missing details with whatever they prefer to assume which makes all further claims dangerous to make decisions on.
Personally I use cash at toll booths, bi-weekly on Craigslist, paying a friend / splitting costs, when the card readers aren't working, and when any total ends up matching an exact bill such as a $20. And sometimes I randomly pay in two dollar bills to screw with people.
Talk about what the banks don't want you to even think about: Use of Credit and Debit cards adds an enormous additional cost to the merchant and, ultimately, to the consumer -- usually just shy of 5%. The conversion to cashless isn't being done to help the citizen, that is for sure. Help the consumer out of their money and their privacy? Of course. Control the consumer? Absolutely. And the dumber than dumb Millennial generation can't put two brain cells together to figure it out. Cui bono?
Was chatting to a hotel manager the other day about Expedia. She told me they often wait up to 3 months after the customer has been and gone to get paid for the stay.