In my Almost There post, I wrote that my everyday carry was down to just 3 items:
- My iPhone
- My house (and possibly) car keys
- My wallet
and that I was trying to get it down to just my phone. The hardest to get rid of turns out to be my wallet. That’s mostly because I have to depend on others to help enable a walletless life. The State of Florida has been talking about issuing digital drivers licenses for at least 5 years but the usual political nonsense keeps holding that up. Still, other states are moving forward and Florida will, I’m sure, follow sometime soon.
The other problem is some big chains stubbornly refusing to enable Apple Pay. In my life, that mainly means Publix, my neighborhood grocery store. I keep bugging them but I always get PR speak for an answer. If Florida and Publix would join the modern world, I could pretty much leave my wallet at home.
The New York Times, through its Wirecutter subsidiary, just published an fascinating article on what it’s like to live without a wallet. In How I Survived a Week Without My Wallet, Sally French describes what happened when she lost her wallet on a trip to Washington DC. She found that, except for a couple of exceptions, it wasn’t too hard to get along with just her iPhone. She got around DC with Uber and and Capital Bikeshare, was able to pay for most meals with Apple Pay, and could easily get cash for those places that didn’t have Apple Pay by using the Bank of America debit card in her iPhone’s wallet. Things like her gym and Airport lounge membership cards had digital versions that she could add to her iPhone wallet.
Even the hard things were possible. Hotels generally require an ID to register but she discovered that her hotel had a digital check-in procedure that allowed her to bypass the front desk entirely and go directly to her room, opening the door with an app on her phone.
The hardest thing, of course, was negotiating the TSA procedures on her flight home. To my surprise, even that was possible if a bit painful. French concludes that living a 100 percent walletless life is not yet feasible, but that we are close. I really enjoyed the article and if you have any interest in such things, you probably will too.