Not Paying with Cash

Summary

I saw another article whiz by a few days ago from a journalist claiming that she only used cash again, and what a boon it had been for her. She’s hardly an isolated case; I’m especially seeing Zoomers in my circles go back to cash in a big way, for what are positive and heartening reasons. You would think someone in my position would relate. I’m trying to reduce my smartphone dependence by offloading as much as I can from its black rectangular confides. I use a mirrorless camera, I read physical books, I make notes with a little pen. While I have Apple Pay set up as an emergency fallback, I don’t use it in my daily life. I’m also wary of online tracking and digital surveillance, to which my years of blogging on the subjects here can attest. I always get a chuckle from people saying you shouldn’t use loyalty cards in grocery stores and the like… when they pay with credit cards! Our spending habits are ripe for data mining, selling, or worse; to say nothing about the potential financial pitfalls and predatory nature of credit card companies that can snare you. You either use credit cards, or credit cards use you, as my dear late friend Jim Kloss used to say. Then there are the benefits cash confers. It’s (mostly) anonymous. It doesn’t come with hidden charges or card access fees that accumulate over time. It isn’t dependent on a merchant remembering to charge their EFTPOS terminal overnight, or having a reliable power source in the first place. It’s not affected by inevitable technical outages at a payment processor. Most critically, cash can be more accessible. You don’t need a bank account, or a smartphone, or have undergone credit checks to use cash. This is why I’ve talked before about “cashless” societies being a worry, because as is frustratingly typical, we risk disenfranchising our most vulnerable and powerless neighbours without designing, testing, and implementing these systems carefully. So why do I continue using cards? For the same reason you probably do:...