Large shops have to have cash offices, counting machines, armoured security vans to bring the cash to the bank and the risk of break in of people trying to steal the cash.
Even small shops have the time taken to count at the end of the day and charges for cash deposits. The security risk of a member of staff walking to the bank to lodge the money also needs to be considered
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This just isn’t true at all. Handling cash costs far more than accepting cards. If a business quits taking cash they’ll save a ton!
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On top of this the risk of staff giving out the wrong change is also reduced.
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I mean, if they deposit the cash with their bank there are some fees to do this (for business accounts). If they use personal accounts, though, there isn’t a fee, and they can get away with it if their volume isn’t too abnormal and they use multiple current accounts with multiple banks. I’m not aware of any other fees they’d have to deal with to handle cash, though. Of course, they could avoid depositing cash as much as possible as well, which further encourages the cycle of using cash. I’m aware a lot of self-employed people, or smaller shops/businesses, like to deal in cash for various reasons like this. Tax evasion, by keeping some income off their records, seems to be a common one with smaller businesses, too.
The people on this forum might not be the most representative sample. I mean, people here are going with a challenger bank that’s still fairly new. And they care enough to sign up to the community for said bank. They’re probably a fair bit more “hip” than your average bloke on the street. We likely see finance in a different way to most.
The average person carries around a fair bit of cash anyway. I deal mostly in cash transactions myself (as a customer). A lot of local businesses near me don’t even accept card payments, some charge a fee on top or have minimum spending amounts to use card (and I don’t live in a rural area).
There’s quite a lot of benefits in accepting cash for smaller merchants. Even though places like Asda happily accept card, a lot of money is spent at these smaller merchants, and their adoption is fairly critical for increasing the general adoption of card payments and decreasing the use of cash.
On top of that, there’s the hassle of signing up for these card services, keeping their accounts in good standing, dealing with chargebacks (if they happen, and the additional risk of fraud as a result). All of that costs time. It’s often not worth it for smaller merchants.
If we ignore the merchants and focus on the consumers, using card everywhere creates a fair digital log. A lot of people, even those that are average and law-abiding citizens, care enough about their privacy. People make a fuss over their digital privacy, even. Using card for all your transactions is a pretty solid log, and I imagine quite a lot of people would have privacy concerns there.
Of course, there’s challenging the “status-quo”, too. There’s a habit of using cash. Even younger people use cash everywhere, more than they use card. To change a systematic habit of using cash so much is perhaps going to take some time. I think some here might underestimate how much cash is used.
Depends on the business. This might be true for something like Asda (my local Asda has phased out a lot of self-checkout tills that supported cash to card-only now, perhaps 1/6th of the self-checkout tills now allow cash payments).
I’m not sure that’s true for smaller businesses, though. Think takeaways, convenience stores, hairdressers, etc.
If we really do the math, perhaps it is still cheaper, but remember that a lot of these people aren’t doing the precise math to see if they’d be saving time (incl. staff time). They make an assumption looking at a fees table, usually, and go with that. Many don’t even do that, they just go with what’s always worked. It’s partially a social issue, not a logistical issue. There’s a habit of doing something, and there’s perhaps not a compelling reason to change. Getting someone who has always accepted cash just fine to change to cash because you’ve done the math and you say it’s cheaper is… perhaps not always going to work (even if you’re correct), they might just be deterred from signing up and making all those changes without seeing a real benefit.
I’m not saying you support it but it’s important to note what you’ve mentioned here isn’t something that we should be encouraging. Everyone should pay what they rightfully owe if only so it’s fair for everyone else. By using cash it’s only encouraging it further in some select instances.
Totally agree here, it’s something that comes up in the forum a lot and something all of us need to bare in mind 
, we are often the front of change.
Privacy is so important, It’s good to know that monzo don’t pass on any personal info besides your card number etc when you make a purchase.
I don’t think that it’s a big enough excuse not to use card payments though unless you have something to hide (not saying you do).
I agree here this is one of the biggest sticking points ! People just get into a way of doing something and don’t like change. Hopefully this can be altered through bettter education and lower fees for merchants.
What I’m saying is for businesses operating legally. Obviously cash can be far cheaper if you dodge taxes, give counterfeit currency in change, etc. But those are the practices included in why I’m totally in favour of a cashless society.
As for creating a trail, that’s kind of the point… Cash can be too anonymous and we need to wipe out criminal activity. You can’t steal a tractor to raid a bunch of cards and use them anonymously.
I’m totally in favour of reasonable privacy. I’m opposed to things like government back doors into messaging tools. But I don’t think financial transactions are included.
Besides, I’m also in support of local and barter currencies (e.g the Bristol Pound) if communities or groups of people want them. I’m not saying physical tokens of exchange should be outlawed. But I’m saying that, as a country, we should quit making (and withdraw from circulation) Government recognised coins and notes (and it should be illegal for private entities to do so in GBP, though they may of course peg their currency to the GBP).
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Of course. But we’re not really convincing each other here, it’s probably not hard to convince people on this site towards any of the viewpoints I’ve detailed since we share a closer ideology on finance, most likely. It’s more about recognising the wider hurdles out there, and why cash is so prevalent (and the challenges to card adoption). This is a common one. HMRC has been cracking down on it. I’m aware of quite a few local businesses that do such techniques, though, and it’s important to note that using cash makes it easier to keep receipts off the books. I don’t have a statistic on how prevalent this is, though, so perhaps it’s a bit meaningless and more negligible than I think.
Some cite government spying, as an example. Some reasons are more rational than others. Justifying the argument is a bit difficult. It’s the same with large Internet companies and any logs they may keep, or government surveillance for terrorism prevention and the rather vocal dispute people had against that, too. Not all of them have something to hide, just quite a non-negligible number like their privacy. Whether that’s justified or not is a different topic, really, it’s more that the fact that such a concern exists. It’d also be one reason that a not-negligible number of people would want to use cash instead of card. There’s also more “domestic” reasons to use cash in some cases, too.
The popularity of Bitcoin/cryptos somewhat supports this too, I feel. Also stuff like this.
What’s just as important to note is how big these “misc” concerns are prevalent. There’s not too much of a survey on this. There’s a HMRC survey showing that card adoption is quite preferred, and that cash is the most offered method but not the most used, for example.
I think using card for a majority of your transactions has a clear benefit. One is the savings pots Monzo has. I don’t keep track of pennies I get as change, for example, and it’s usually fairly hard to spend them. Rounding those up into a savings pot is a pretty nice idea. I wonder how much all the change I’ve lost would’ve added up to.
So despite some of these concerns I expressed, I suppose the biggest is probably just in fees for merchants to accept card. The feasible approaches to this, I think, are either processors should decrease the fees, there should be more pressure from customers for merchants to go cashless (e.g. @jwhiterz said that he doesn’t use cash-only merchants much), or the fee should be transferred to the customer.
I guess the 2nd point is something more of us can adopt, definitely something I could improve on at least by using my card wherever possible.
Some surveys before wider contactless adoption, btw:
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/10/01/three-million-small-businesses-still-dont-accept-cards-despite/
- Uses of cash and electronic payments - GOV.UK
A HMRC survey now would be interesting, I can’t seem to find one at a glance though. The contactless usage in that survey is tiny, but that was 2016. Contactless is pretty great and I see people using it quite a lot now.
Beside fees, which are fairly reasonable in many cases now, one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the past for a small business was simply being able to accept cards.
There used to be fairly large setup costs and a mountain of paperwork just to get a merchant account and begin accepting cards, and then often the bank would want to hold a portion of the money for x months in reserve.
This isn’t really the case now with the prevalence of things like iZettle and PayPal Here. So quite a large barrier has been removed, in my opinion, but I’m not sure the message has reached many small/cash only businesses.
So the nothing to hide argument is OK for finances but not messaging? I wholeheartedly disagree. While it is admirable to want to prevent crimes from occurring, this cannot be done at the expense of our privacy. If you are happy for all your finances to be traceable and accessible to government’s scrutiny, why not the same for messages?
You should be able to spend that £50 you withdrew yesterday without anyone knowing what you spent it on, if you so wish, what the money was spent on is irrelevant.
As with private messaging, I don’t like the idea of governments having unfettered access to finances without an opt-out option as cash currently is.
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Cash isn’t going anywhere fast, but I mostly live a cashless life at the moment, and it’s only getting easier and easier to do so.
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I see your “nothing to hide argument”, and whilst I’m more in that camp than not, I appreciate for some people, the untraceable “cash option” is preferred.
But… I just don’t see how holding onto an ancient payment method is going to work in the long term.
If anything, you’d want the technology to increase at a quicker pace, so you can deal in bitcoin etc.
Maybe I’m naive, but hoping/wanting old technology to stay around as its “untracable”, will end up hindering more than it helps (in my opinion of course).
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The cash machine on the corner fro me was blown up twice and stolen once and that was a small notemachine one so they decided to move it and change it to the bigger phone box type ones and surround it in metal bollards so it couldn’t get dragged away, 2 weeks later it got nicked 
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Nope, still true. Time spent reconciling cash, sorting floats, going to the bank, that all adds up. And it’s time not spent doing the job I’m paid to do, effectively. Or in other cases, businesses have to hire extra office/admin staff to do this part. Dealing with cash carries its own cost.
I do, I love technology and I want to live in the future. However there are legitimate concerns that the pace of change is more than the more vulnerable members of society can cope with.
Considering we are still trying to get everyone online, there are other eggs to crack first I think.
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Oh I completely agree - I think it’s a good opportunity to develop those “next age” technologies, whilst we can still cater for the generations looking to catch up.
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