On Sunday I was riding through a village when, outside the church, I saw a cake stall. A blackboard announced "Cyclists! Stop for CAKE! 50p, raising funds for foodbank." So I stopped, obviously. And didn't get any cake, because it was just a small table with cake under a glass dome and an honesty box. I had no cash on me – haven't carried any since lockdown and had been slowly getting out of the habit of using (but not of carrying) before that – and there was no other way to pay, and no one around.
This got me thinking about possible reasons for carrying cash. Here's a list I've come up with. Feel free to add other reasons as they occur to you and to comment on the ones that have occurred to me:
- Unattended honesty box situations
- People selling jam etc from their gardens
- Leaving tips for waiters
- For use in small shops that still don't take cards
- For small purchases in shops with a card minimum
- For shops in countries with a card levy
- Giving money to buskers or beggars
- When it's necessary to bribe policemen, border agents, hotel staff, etc
- Paying for photocopying etc in the library (they only take cash here)
- Gifts to kids
- As backup if cards fail/are rejected or get lost/stolen
- Old skool audaxes with village hall controls run by the WI or similar
It's unlikely many of these will happen in a typical day. Some of them might never happen through your entire life (I've only once had to bribe a border agent-type person, and that wasn't even at a border...) and many of them are location specific, while others can be avoided by going to a different shop (usually). But occasionally, it would be nice to have had that cake. Nevertheless, I haven't started carrying cash yet. But maybe...
When I worked for a certain cash machine manufacturer in their R&D there was always the need to convince people that cash will always be useful, and so to therefore would cash machines.
I don't know what the people that went to the trade shows actually told customers what future cash might have, but the behind the scenes comments about what might still need to be paid for in cash in future isn't in that list...
It was their major fear, if cash is no longer required, what purpose the ATM?
So all the work relating to contactless I did was "defensive" i.e. how does our machine still have a purpose in a cash free world.
Never really envisaged the rise in honesty box shops tbh.
While I'm here, has anyone else experienced their card payment occasionally being declined when tapping? Works fine if I then actually put the card in and enter my pin. I guess that there must be a limit on the number of times that a card may be tapped before pin conformation is required.
Yes. It's annoying, isn't it? Or maybe it's a reassuring security feature. I think it's every ten transactions.
Set by the bank, I think mine is 5, it's usually x transactions since last PIN transaction.
Pain in the hoop, but you can avoid it by using Google or Apple pay because the device being unlocked is apparently acceptable security.
I'm sure there was initially the possibility of doing the pin from a tap, but you'd have needed to hold the card in range for the comms to keep going (would be the same on an ATM)
The EMV and RFID specs were public IIRC