As most of you know by now, I’m very interested in being able to pay for everything with my phone and not having to carry around credit cards, let alone cash. I’m also aware that not everyone shares that desire so I was interested in this Kontra tweet:
San Francisco Federal Reserve: 55% of all transactions under \$10 are paid for using cash…the average amount of cash Americans carry in their wallets has increased from \$51 in 2015 to \$59 by 2017. #FromTheWeAreNotChinaDept
— Kontra (@counternotions) January 3, 2020
I was a bit surprised that cash appeared to remain so popular so I did a little digging. I read the actual Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report and, of course, it doesn’t support the “Cash Is King” conclusion drawn by the press.
The report is based on a 2017 survey of 2,848 “nationally representative” people. The first thing you notice is that the use of cash predominates only in the sense that it is used more often than any other single payment type. When you combine credit cards, debit cards, and electronic payments you see that while cash and checks represents 36% of payments, credit/debit cards and electronic payments represent 58% so payments are, in fact, mostly cashless. The results, as you’d expect, vary with age. Older people tend to use more cash, while the under 34 cohort uses the least.
The comments to the “Cash Is King” report mostly poke fun at the US for being so backward in their payment methods. People from all over the world chimed in to say that of course they use contactless payment methods and mostly don’t bother carrying cash. On the other hand, a reddit discussion of that report—mostly by Americans—say that they also use contactless payments for almost everything and most say they also don’t bother carrying cash except maybe for emergencies. Some commenters say that when they do use cash, it’s for amounts less than \$10 and then only because the store wouldn’t accept cards for amounts less than that.
I haven’t run across the “no credit cards for less than \$10” in some time and even when I did, it was almost always a Mom & Pop shop. The chains have long ago given up on minimum amounts for credit charges.
The TL;DR of this longish post is that Betteridge’s law holds in this case and we can answer the question in the title with, “No.”