06/09/2024
DOES THE CASHLESS ECONOMY MAKE (DOLLARS) AND SENSE?
By Doug McIntyre
When did people turn on money? I thought everyone loves money? You can spend it, save it, fold it, lend it, borrow it, bury it, toss it away, blow it, hoard it, covet it, worship it, put in the bank, or stuff it in a mattress. You could even send it to me if you don’t know what else to do with it. And it’s accepted everywhere, right?
Not anymore.
Increasingly, retail stores are shunning cash for digital only transactions despite “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private” being printed on every bill.
Of course I use credit cards. I’m an American, am I not? Still, cash remains king at my house. The Wife and I have been known to elbow each other as we battle for a stray quarter rattling around in the dryer. Who hasn’t experienced the rapturous joy of finding a forgotten twenty tucked in a jacket pocket you haven’t worn since Christmas? And when you were a kid, that birthday check from Aunt Helen was nice, but nothing compared to that crisp fiver Uncle Harry snapped tight before pressing it into your greedy mitts. Today, not so much. Especially younger people who don’t even want to swipe or insert their debit or credit cards; tapping, Apple Pay, and Crypto is where it’s at, and stores love it! No cash to be robbed at gunpoint or pilfered by that sticky-fingered kid who works on Sundays. No coins to roll and haul to the bank on Friday. Cash had a good run, and remains popular with cheating husbands and the paranoid who don’t trust on-line commerce to keep their accounts secure. In fact, 16-percent of all payments in 2023 were still made with cash according to the Federal Reserve. But cash has probably had its day.
Even The Wife now eschews the checkbook for Zelle or some other form of financial alchemy I don’t understand. Our kids never carry cash, or even a wallet, with credit and debit cards tucked alongside their driver’s licenses in a pocket on the back of their iPhones. I am-- no surprise-- the family dinosaur who still writes checks and pays cash and even saves coins in glass milk bottles, my emergency stash for when hackers breach B of A and zero out everyone’s life savings. Let’s see who’s the dinosaur then!
Meanwhile, there are real reasons why the cashless economy is a senseless economy for many.
Despite the generational shift, millions still fall through the cracks of the global banking system. The unbanked, (an actual term for people without credit and debit cards) frequently find themselves shut out from local businesses who have gone cashless. To address this, the Los Angeles City Council recently passed an ordinance, still to be enacted, banning the practice as a matter of equity and inclusion. In Sacramento, SB-926 will make that ban state-wide, while Congress continues to work on national legislation restoring King Cash to its throne. But there is a lot of money riding on cashless.
RedyRef is a New Jersey based company that makes reverse ATM machines like the ones installed at money pits like Dodger Stadium. The cash dependent can stuff money into the machine and get a card they can use to buy hotdogs and little helmets full of soft serve. For a fee, of course. While the gas stations will give you a discount for using cash, the Dodgers (and others) are charging you for using United States currency, including local government agencies when folks try to pay traffic tickets or other fines with cash.
Plastic is obviously a great convenience but it comes at a huge cost. That $2.25 bottle of water we tap at the 7-11 quickly becomes $3.15 if we carry a balance on our Visa cards. Charging everything is inflationary.
And it’s seductive.
We don’t feel the true cost of things when we charge them like we do when we have to take cash out of our wallets. Casinos have known this forever. Chips make it easier to justify staying in with a game with a lousy hand than having actual money on the table. Weekly withholding taxes deducted from our paychecks prevent us peasants from grabbing our pitchforks and torches and storming the IRS. Can you imagine if we had to write a check for our entire tax tab every April 15th? Prices creep up easily in a cashless economy just the way a frog sits in a pot of water until it’s boiled alive. $22 for a movie ticket didn’t happen overnight.
Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. His novel, Frank's Shadow is availabe at Amazon.com.
