I had two reasons, the first is because i found it way too easy to spend on my card without thinking, and the second because I wanted to regain a bit of privacy alongside everything else I’m doing. Ive set it up in my bank that on payday, an amount of my salary automatically goes to the bills account, some goes to long term savings, some to short term savings, then the rest I take out in cash.
It really does change my perception of spending I think: Ive found myself not buying things because I didnt want to break a note and carry change. I can physically see how much I have left. I can take £20 to the pub and leave when its finished. Plus it feels really good knowing every single transaction isnt stored forever. I have a small amount of money on a contactless ring for emergencies like a bus fare or somewhere that unexpectedly only takes card.
Is anyone else still predominantly using cash day to day?
I visited the UK back in 2022 and I was pretty baffled at how you can universally “tap to pay”. We visited a pub on the coast of Dorset where they wouldn’t even accept cash as a mean of payment. All in all it was nice, because it meant not having to deal with a foreign currency at all, we spent 10 days just using electronic payment, so as a tourist I think it was a good experience.
In Germany, where I live, you’re basically getting nowhere without cash, it’s still very difficult to eat out or buy small food items like bread or a sandwich. There’s also a culture of paying cash for many things, including pricier items like a second hand car! Shop cashiers usually don’t even blink if you try to pay with a 100€ bill (except if you’re coming super early and they don’t have change available yet). It’s not unusual for me to end up drawing a quarter to half my monthly salary in cash.
I first disliked it when I moved from France, but now I think it’s actually good for the society. You always have some change to tip a waiter or give to a beggar, a coin for the cart at the supermarket, get something from a vending machine… Also I live in a very quiet area so getting mugged is very unlikely, making it not so scary to carry cash around.
I live in Germany too without using cash for a few years now and it’s no problem at all.
Yes, even the buses and vending machines and car park meters and public toilets have tap to pay. It is certainly very convenient but I think it does encourage spending more, and of course it means literally everything you do is tracked. Luckily I’ve found that most places still do accept cash but there are definitely a few who don’t.
Breaking into those machines and robbing cashless shops also doesn’t have the incentive of immediate cash reward.
I agree, cash is fun in Germany. I think it really helps that the 1 and 2 euro coins are available and used in circulation. It was so nice going into the Späti and buying a beer with a single coin.
Change feels unnecessary in the States since the highest denomination that’s widely circulated is the quarter dollar. There are dollar coins, but they are hardly ever used.
€1-2 for a beer? Germany truly is more advanced than the US
Some are only 30 cents! At least they were…
Haha don’t get me started with US coins, I also have a fun story there: we arrived fresh off JFK Airport in NYC and headed to our rental apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn. It was pretty far from the a subway station so we got a connecting bus to get us closer.
The next day, we thought of taking the same bus line to head to Manhattan, except our party of four ended up being expected to pay 4x $2.75 in a machine inside the bus… in coins. That’s 44 quarters. Yup, don’t have that on day 2 of my stay. So we walked 6 blocks.
I find it interesting that Germany is so far behind when it comes to IT and modernization. It’s like you’re stuck in 1990, even though you’re surrounded by countries that have used chip payment cards since the early 2000s and contactless payments since the early to mid 2010s. Nobody here in Denmark has touched a fax machine in the last 15-20 years, and apparently Germans still fax things sometimes to this day??
hey don’t belittle technological advancements in germany, people here at are the forefront of innovation: https://simple-fax.de/fax-ki
:'D
Canada has universal tap to pay also, but what surprised me about the UK—at least in the London area—was how quick it was? The payment processing was near-instantaneous. In Canada, I think the machines make a phone call behind the scenes to a bank or something? There’s a significant delay before it goes through.
They use mobile data over here so it can be very slow in spotty areas, but most populated areas in the UK have full 4G/5G.
Ah that makes sense.
I think another thing that might be uniquely Canadian is when you’re paying at a drivethru and you see the machine emerge from the pickup window taped to the end of a hockey stick. That was a big thing during the pandemic for social distancing. I guess more recently, they’ve been moving to less improvised solutions, which is a shame. I really liked the hockey stick!
With the exception of my early college career (pre-dodd-frank) I never really stopped using cash. It’s much harder to budget using a card even though these days you can check your bank balance from your phone.
Being able to use cash is a privilege, and we should not let governments take it from us, since then they can monitor and control everything money-related.
I’m starting to use more cash for daily spendings. The rise of surveillance pricing is terrible, better to hide qt least some of information from my bank.
Not only that. Companies are now charging people extra for using cards, passing on their processing fees to consumers.
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I’m finding supermarkets locking their regular prices behind an app or loyalty card is getting out of control. Out of all the major supermarkets, ONLY Aldi has nothing of the sort currently.
Tesco and Sainsbury’s will often have a £3 item that costs £6 without their loyalty card. Of course it’s £3 in every other shop: it’s not a special offer for members, it’s a punishment price for those who don’t give away their data.
A nice way to understand how much your data costs
But say you only use that card for that store, where’s the privacy invasion? It wouldn’t be much right? Trying to find a downside of a store card.
two words: data aggregation.
They know it’s you. They can match it everywhere else.
Tesco now even has stores in the UK where you scan your loyalty card on the way in, pick up items off shelves, and walk out and it charges you accurately. The amount of cameras and sensors on the ceiling was uncanny. So not only do they have your purchasing profile but they now know what you look like, your gait, and any other identifying information they use to make that work
(OK it might be just lads in the Philippines following you on CCTV like Amazon did but still)
Cause I’m looking at signing up for an REI credit card and haven’t found much downside researching it online. I do find it sus that all the employees are pushing it though. Asking if we are members and have the credit card and stuff.
Because then REI gets to be the one selling your purchase history and credit report.
Hmm I don’t think I would like that.
I usually ask other people in line for their loyalty cards. Or, in case there are none (which is rare) - I have found usable photos of random cards’ barcodes. It was mostly from the respective loyalty programs’ reviews, but I believe I saw a group that specifically shared theirs to get extra points.
Wow, I’ve never seen pricing that bad without a loyalty card in the US. Not saying it doesn’t happen, quite often it’s a 20-30% discount for the loyalty card, and occasionally more if you use the app (which I refuse, since I use Jenny’s number for the loyalty card).
You’re right to call it a punishment. Wonder if we can aggregate the loyalty app program somehow, like host the app in an Android VM on a VPS that anyone can then access, so the data they get is muddied.
Safeway. That’s only one of the several good reasons why I don’t shop there.
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Some credit cards offer 2% cash back… (Not points) So it’s hard to give that up when you get 2% off for just about every dollar you spend. Why wouldn’t you put every dollar on card you would normally spend.
This doesn’t work well if you are paying interest…
If you’re fiscally savvy and don’t overspend and can pay your balance in full every month and are not paying interest, this is a strong vote for choosing over cash.
However, without that…I see no benefit and would use more cash for all reasons in this thread.
Well that’s the way it should be. If they’re selling your data, they should compensate you for that in some way. Then it becomes a personal decision as to how much it matters to you.
As an aside, this is why I recently degoogled, having been all in on Google products for 10 years. 10 years ago you got amazing value for your data from Google but now every single useful product has been enshittified or shut down and they collect more data than ever. The sums just don’t add up any more.
This is sort of a scam though. Credit cards give rewards, but then charge the business for the processing fees. So the business needs to raise prices to cover the fees. So really no one is getting that 2% except for the card network. And if you don’t use a card you lose 2%.
It is basically a protection racket. “It would be a shame if you didn’t use our credit card and had to pay 2% more everywhere”
Yes, I know it is complicated. Handling cash also costs non-trivial amounts. I know that the EU has limits on fees (and that is why basically no credit cards have rewards there). I also know that some businesses see the fee as more of a marketing costs because higher spenders tend to use cards and people tend to spend more on cards.
Out in NYC, the bodegas all have a little plaquard saying that either 1: listed prices include a 2% credit card fee and you can save by using cash, or 2: listed prices may not match your final charge because they add a 2% fee on top for credit cards.
Which is the same thing effectively but it can be sometimes confusing if you’re trying to watch for the fee.
Anecdotally, I have sometimes noticed the cashier will say a price, and then say a slightly different price when I pull out the card. So it’s not like they always apply the fee regardless. At least some of the time anyway.
Not universal of course. I don’t remember if that’s also true for grocery stores, and it’s probably not the case for big chains but honestly I don’t know.
You’re also paying in the data they sell on you
Indeed. Its very uncommon to get flat cashback options in the UK for this reason. I think I had AmEx that gave me 1% for a year and nothing after that.
I regularly consider doing this. Obviously it is great from a privacy perspective. But I hate dealing with cash, especially change. With cards I just have one thing in my wallet and it just works forever. My bank account is automatically charged at the end of the month. With cash I need to keep refilling my wallet and carry around annoying change.
I would love to have something digital but also private (like Monero). But so far I have been picking convenience over privacy.
Change is easy to deal with. Just give it to the people begging.
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If it’s low-value change you won’t feel any worse giving it away. And if it’s so valuable to you then it must be valuable enough that you can buy something you want with it.
Yeah this is me.
I acknowledge the privacy issues but cash is way too inconvenient.
This is all perfect when you live in a responsible country where people pay their taxes. Instead, when you live in a place where paying your taxes is seen as something stupid, the less cash, the less space for tax evaders.
I loved it when COVID came and the government started giving all these businesses owners (bars, hairdressers, etc) a subside based on the profits they declared the year before COVID and they all went mad because they were getting 600€/month (which, ironically is the amount they declared to have earned monthly the year before COVID).
You do understand that most tax evasion happens a ultra wealthy and mega corps level, not peasants buying food and beer for cash?
And this tax evasion happens with in our banking system, money too big for cash.
I do. But so what? Since they are small businesses we should let them evade taxes? Tax evasion is a problem, and I agree we should go against all those billionaires, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the smaller evaders.
Tax authorities need to enforce laws on the books as is, going after cash usage is not enforcing tax laws.
Going after cash in anyway is not the way… you are literally fucking over peasants as social level to gain marginal revenue that likely won’t even come.
Taxation is theft.
Plenty of cash only businesses in the UK that engage in this, although of course just because a business is cash only, doesn’t mean they’re a tax dodge.
IMO the two things are separate: it should be the tax office that does audits to catch this. It’s not very hard to see a vape shop that makes £500 a month with two top model BMWs outside might be dodgy.
I agree. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have enough tax auditors to combat something that is so prevalent in my country.
Thank God, taxation is theft. If your country must have tax auditors, let them have exactly one tax auditor for the entire country.
Least edgy libertarian. Hope you don’t like driving on roads or using the internet fibres
I only use cash at places that have a purchase portal as complicated as giving change. You want to hand me a tip machine on a stick without tap pay and select a tip amount on a tiny shitty touch screen? You can count my change, thanks. Hopefully we see some traction in public opinion regarding privacy soon. Until then banks are selling your data, but the infra is required to live a modern life.
I also want to pay more in cash to reward businesses for still allowing you to pay in cash as I’m noticing more are going cashless. I’m occasionally reliant on cash so I don’t want to end up stranded on those occasions where I can only pay cash, so definitely want to ensure the option remains open. The privacy is a benefit too of course.
I think at the moment I mostly buy “important” stuff in cash and everyday stuff with card. Important like a new computer or something, because I’d plan to have that computer for a while and don’t want it easily traced to me. Everyday stuff like food because, while I completely understand not wanting the state/banks/etc to know anything about you, I personally don’t care too much if the state knows what I eat. Would be nice to eventually become one of those people with no footprint at all though.
A computer is something you’d want to buy with a credit card, as they often come with additional free warranties for various mishaps
Thats fine if you value the warranty over your privacy (not trying to be sarcastic, everyone has a different threat model and I mean it when I say that’s fine for some people), but personally I would prefer the computer were not traceable to me, including at the cost of having to buy replacements when they otherwise come with warranty. I have turned down various things that electronics come with that require leaving your details. I understand why people leave their details to get the extra stuff but i am willing to spend more to be anonymous.
Anyone in a 14 eyes country is essentially impossible to achieve zero footprint, but assuming they’re not actively looking into your network packets or searching for you on CCTV its feasible to have a relatively low footprint. I’m essentially trying to eliminate as far as practical, any data points I’m just giving away for free for no reason, especially to corporations and advertisers.
Afraid they almost definitely are actively monitoring all my above-ground activities lol, I’m in a country getting quite a bit of international flak for cracking down on political dissidents. Won’t say any more than that, tbh that doesn’t narrow down my location much with the current state of things anyway. But yeah I agree, I want to minimise the amount of data accessible about me.
I’m nor a cash-only convert, but I have some anecdotal evidence for you.
I’ve visited Boston five times in the past thirty years. Every single time I used my debit card at Thanuel Hall for food, my card was later used for fraud. Always caught and never a big inconvenience beyond replacing my card, but still not ideal. I only ever use cash there now.
Online shopping, before the Amazon monopoly on e-commerce, my card would get compromised every few months.
Now I use privacy.com for all transactions that allow it, and its amazing how often those cards are stolen. Thanks to the way the service works, the stolen cards are useless to scammers or thieves, but my declined transaction filter has a few charges declined each month.
My point being that if you want to avoid fraud, and you can do it, cash is king.
Yeah I always use throwaway cards from my bank online, game changer. Even if just free trials so they can’t charge me if I accidentally don’t cancel
Never stopped using cash. It works, is less trackable and most importantly is accepted for exchange of goods even outside of your typical store front. Say when buying hay or straw for horses and paying then and there.
All day, everyday! Freedom over convenience!
I actually started with it this week. It is partially due to privacy but also because I lost a sense for value. It is really easy to press a button online and pay say 20 euro. Not that I am irresponsible with money but the numbers on your bank account feel so meaningless.
If you fully stop using cashless at the grocery store you might get put on a list. Governments love tracking irregularities.
Appearing “normal” and occasionally using cash at your regular grocery store makes it far less suspicious. Then for every irregular store you can use cash.
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People don’t understand that not leaving any trace is suspicious of itself. Though it requires participating in a system many oppose.
Then more of us should get ourselves on those lists. We should make the lists useless by way of flooding them
I rarely use cash. Nearly everything I spend is on supermarket and they know exactly what I buy because we’re forced to use their “loyalty” programs anyway.
Then traveling: dealing with other currencies, coming home with unspendable money. And there’s no interest on cash lying around.
But I hate the tendency for places to not accept cash at all, there should still be a choice.
One bonus is that I keep finding money on the streets in countries that love cash.
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I’m using fake names on all those things, but prices without loyalty are often insane. It’s basically an extra tourist tax.
They also usually tie loyalty cards to phone numbers. So tell them 555-555-5555. Chances are high that someone already registered a card to some bullshit phone number, and many people are using it simultaneously
In what country are you forced to use loyalty cards?
I’ve never had a cashier tell me I couldn’t pay without a loyalty cars. Usually I ask them to swipe their card, which 80% of the time they do because they get free gas or whatever
Czechia. In many supermarkets “discounts” only apply when you have a card/app. Essentially the “discount” is normal price, otherwise you’ll pay nearly double.
And the cashier doesn’t swipe their own card if you ask them politely to do so?
I really doubt that.
