I own a legitimate, legal business. Half my revenues come in as cash.
It is crazy insecure, dangerous, inconvenient, and used often for illegal things.
If you don't like it, don't use it. But don't take my right to use it away.
If all you can think of for things "people don't want tracked" is "crime" I don't think you've thought about the problem set very long.
It's incredibly damaging to never have "things be in the past". One thing experience has taught us is that any electronic records generated will be kept indefinitely regardless of policy or law.
I just don't understand folks who seem to be completely ok with any agency remotely curious in you being able to re-construct your entire spending history over your life. You might just be so boring you can't imagine hiding anything, but I think you're in the minority.
This is also ignoring the additional transaction taxes private institutions put upon the entire consumer economy. All this so you can maybe do away with some crime (I just think payments will transition and simply cost more) for what amounts to convenience and security. As with all things, I think making that trade ends in long-term ruin.
Oh, by the way, one of these countries is Germany.
You must live in a bubble then. I live in a beach town where there are many small restaurants, souvenir stores etc. that only take cash. (It's not a problem for the tourists because there are many ATMs). Once you leave your bubble there are also farm stands, yard sales and so on.
You wrote this without an ounce of introspection, not thinking about what we classify as "crime" nowadays and how much are entirely victimless activities.
Your post reeks of inexperience.
In fact, trying to pay cash can cause problems -- so many people use the electronic methods, the doorman might not have any change. (This is often the case at the weird gigs I go to, where only 25 people attend anyway, and it barely breaks even for the promoter).
I've heard of a trial to donate money to the homeless using a card, but it was only a trial. It's not normal to tip in a restaurant (or anywhere else).
However, the post spoke of having to buy illegal alcohol at college, so the person is clearly in America. But there are always queues at the cash machines near Christiania in Copenhagen, where everyone goes to buy weed. That's the only remaining thing Danes use cash for...
Um, what? It's still normal and people do tip at resturants in Sweden. To be fair, neither you or I have any numbers to back it up and have to chalk it up to experience/intuition.
I thought I'd finally got a clear answer (no tip) but evidently not.
Some of that is simplified by just having a jar of cash with limited options for opaque gaming.
That is a very coarse and completely unfounded statement. The situation differs greatly per country; you can spend months without touching cash in the Netherlands or Sweden. In the Netherlands we've passed the 50% mark for electronic debit card payments at a point of sale a decade ago!
Online purchases are soaring too across the continent, which means that for clothes and electronics there is a shift towards less and less cash transactions each day.
probably because netherlands and sweden make up only 4% of europes population and the other countries are slower at adopting it.
I know maybe a handful of people except myself under 50 who still use cash for anything, ever. They tend to also have Thinkpads and GPG keys.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/04/sweden-cash...
EDIT - looking at the date of the article it might have been not the same, but a similar one.
Sweden does seem to be this cashless outlier for some reason. [EDIT: I gather it's a Nordics thing more generally.] I think it was also featured in a Freakonomics episode fairly recently.
Depends on your definition of plastic. Debit cards are common here. Europeans tend not to use credit cards as much as Americans though; they are mostly used just for travelling or (international) internet purchases.
For example, on my campus, the vast majority of all cash transactions, from what I've experienced, are to buy illegal drugs or to illegally obtain alcohol. The rest of the transactions are with dining services and with clubs. Because dining services has to keep so much cash on hand, they are a major target for crime; they need to hire more expensive managers to count it, they need to have more cameras and security staff to monitor it, and they need to hire armored guards to carry it off to the bank. In the past front line employees have been shot in armed robberies, so yes, the many safety mechanisms are necessary.
What incentive does anyone in this story have to keep using physical cash? It is crazy insecure, dangerous, inconvenient, and used often for illegal things. The criminals (who are more than you'd think; who do you know who hasn't broken at law at least once or twice?) have an incentive to keep cash around. That is legitimate, but as a society, a better approach would be to rewrite our laws to better capture the realities of human behavior and serve the community interest. When people are routinely getting away with things (drinking, smoking, etc.) it is probably time to make them legal and grant those people the full protections of the law and the monetary system - including non-physical value.