{"id":8565,"date":"2020-01-05T13:17:25","date_gmt":"2020-01-05T18:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8565"},"modified":"2020-01-05T13:17:25","modified_gmt":"2020-01-05T18:17:25","slug":"is-cash-still-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8565","title":{"rendered":"Is Cash Still King?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As most of you know by now, I\u2019m very interested in being able to pay for <i>everything<\/i> with my phone and not having to carry around credit cards, let alone cash. I\u2019m also aware that not everyone shares that desire so I was interested in this Kontra tweet:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">San Francisco Federal Reserve: 55% of all transactions under \\$10 are paid for using cash\u2026the average amount of cash Americans carry in their wallets has increased from \\$51 in 2015 to \\$59 by 2017. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/FromTheWeAreNotChinaDept?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#FromTheWeAreNotChinaDept<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Kontra (@counternotions) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/counternotions\/status\/1213131655960920064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 3, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I was a bit surprised that cash appeared to remain so popular so I did a little digging. I read the actual <a href=\"https:\/\/www.frbsf.org\/cash\/publications\/fed-notes\/2018\/november\/2018-findings-from-the-diary-of-consumer-payment-choice\/\">Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report<\/a> and, of course, it doesn\u2019t support the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KRZ4OodETr8\">\u201cCash Is King\u201d<\/a> conclusion drawn by the press.<\/p>\n<p>The report is based on a 2017 survey of 2,848 \u201cnationally representative\u201d 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 <i>single<\/i> 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\u2019d expect, vary with age. Older people tend to use more cash, while the under 34 cohort uses the least.<\/p>\n<p>The comments to the \u201cCash Is King\u201d 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 <i>they<\/i> use contactless payment methods and mostly don\u2019t bother carrying cash. On the other hand, a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/AskAnAmerican\/comments\/ben5mr\/is_it_accurate_that_the_majority_of_transactions\/\">reddit discussion<\/a> of that report\u2014mostly by Americans\u2014say that <i>they<\/i> also use contactless payments for almost everything and most say they also don\u2019t bother carrying cash except maybe for emergencies. Some commenters say that when they <i>do<\/i> use cash, it\u2019s for amounts less than \\$10 and then only because the store wouldn\u2019t accept cards for amounts less than that.<\/p>\n<p>I haven\u2019t run across the \u201cno credit cards for less than \\$10\u201d in some time and even when I did, it was almost always a Mom &amp; Pop shop. The chains have long ago given up on minimum amounts for credit charges.<\/p>\n<p>The TL;DR of this longish post is that <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines\">Betteridge\u2019s law<\/a> holds in this case and we can answer the question in the title with, \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As most of you know by now, I\u2019m very interested in being able to pay for everything with my phone and not having to carry around credit cards, let alone cash. I\u2019m also aware that not everyone shares that desire &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8565\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[201],"class_list":["post-8565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-cashless"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8566,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8565\/revisions\/8566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}