When I worked at the Strand, New York’s biggest bookstore, our internet would often go down, making things very inconvenient. After all, a lost connection meant that the credit card machines ceased to work. “We can take cash!” I and other cashiers would holler at our long lines of customers, but only a trickle out of the book-loving hordes would actually take us up on the offer. The rest would either leave, or wait – sometimes for a very long time – for the machines to come back online.
It’s common to believe we’re becoming a “cashless society.” Such observations tend to regard this as a fait accompli – as if currency were simply one of so many Old World analog relics circling the drain before they gurgle into oblivion – and an inevitability accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In those early days in which we simply didn’t know about whether we could catch COVID-19 through objects touched by infected people, many institutions phased cash out entirely to reduce physical contact between customers and staff. Those concerns are no longer founded in scientific evidence; there is plenty of research to show that the virus is airborne and spreads through sharing air, not countertops, and we’ve known this for a while now. And yet businesses have largely not pivoted back – and if anything, more businesses are focusing on non-cash transactions.
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It’s common to believe we’re becoming a “cashless society.” Such observations tend to regard this as a fait accompli – as if currency were simply one of so many Old World analog relics circling the drain before they gurgle into oblivion – and an inevitability accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In those early days in which we simply didn’t know about whether we could catch COVID-19 through objects touched by infected people, many institutions phased cash out entirely to reduce physical contact between customers and staff. Those concerns are no longer founded in scientific evidence; there is plenty of research to show that the virus is airborne and spreads through sharing air, not countertops, and we’ve known this for a while now. And yet businesses have largely not pivoted back – and if anything, more businesses are focusing on non-cash transactions.
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Why Cashless Economy means social exclusion
