Mornin’ all,
I saw this this morning and thought it might be of interest to all of us geeky finance types:
Personally I would be in favour of a largely cashless society. I don’t understand why the focus isn’t on convincing those who don’t have bank accounts to get one and teaching people how easy/safe digital payments etc are now.
Quite a few threads discussing the old cashless thing…here’s a recent one.
The below topic is the oldest and one with the most activity:
I read that as Scotland initially and was quite confused.
There’s an opposite to this though. My small village has mostly always been cash only, and some of the older companies still are. But newer businesses have been popping up with those square readers and only accept card.
So we’re seeing a transition away from not everywhere accepts cards to not everywhere accepts cash. I suspect the pandemic will usher things along that transition with some haste too.
Does your village include the garage with one pump and the chap in an overall with oily rag in hand? 
Can’t say that it does! 
Maybe some will, but that wasn’t the case with the local alpaca farm! I just couldn’t buy anything until the card reader was working!
A less well-known Sherlock Holmes film as I recall? 
Or
This happened here. For hygeine reasons many of the local shops stopped accepting cash. As things have opened up they’ve remained card only… maybe they’ll go back to both, maybe not.
Genuine question… what is for sale at an Alpaca farm?? (other than alpacas?!)
I guess there is a gift shop there with toys and such 
Alpaca themed souvenirs mostly. Mugs, plush toys, pencil sets, hats etc. They also have a small fish & chips cafe. Also some knitwear made from their own alpaca wool!
My village used to have exactly this, with a very old fashioned petrol station and garage combo, but the guy actually accepted cards (and the petrol station closed in 2010 due to too much competition from a Shell only 1 mile away)!
I suppose he was a technology pioneer, despite the appearance of his “old-timey” set up!
Admittedly, his card machine did work via dial-up, but it worked fine with Chip and PIN (and contactless at the time was very rare).
Cash is important otherwise a bank could shut you off from buying anything if cashless society
Can you elaborate please, I don’t understand how a bank could be allowed (or would) do such a thing? Especially when they make a lot of their money from card transactions.
If anything I imagine banks would do everything in their power to support a cashless society. In addition to the above they would cut so many overheads to name a few.
You hear about accounts being locked out all the time even if it was due to a technical issue… imagine the inconvenience of that happening to you at least you can still buy your bread with some good old fashioned cash.
True! it does open the possibility of more tech related issues. However I’ve not known of any issues lasting more than a few hours and it is usually isolated to one provider. I can’t see anyone starving in that time or it causing anything more than a minor inconvenience.
The last time this happened I believe it stopped some people completing house purchases and such but they’re not done with cash anyway so it wouldn’t make a difference regardless.
You’re right one wouldn’t starve but who draws the line on how important that particular transaction is and your ability to not make it cause cash was abolished,
Anyways I’m sure this is way further down the line but definitely on the horizon.