While the CC may or may not be slow. In the 5+ months I've now been living in Germany, I've noticed that people are very keen to pay with exact change if they can dig it up. This is an even slower process, but also seems to be the norm.
That's made easier by the VAT system as opposed to the US sales tax system.
Totals are easy to calculate in your head. I'd say this is a stronger driver of cash use than anything cited in the article.
A few years ago I visited Berlin again and tried to leave few cents in local supermarket. It was the only time while being there that I can remember people giving me unfriendly looks. Cashier was also visibly unhappy.
I don't remember any unfriendly looks. But then again, I'm German, so I probably just didn't notice the looks. :)
The cashier's get into trouble if they have an incorrect amount of money in the counter and you're essentially telling them you're too good to bother putting the coins into the donations box sitting centimeters next to you.
If that isnt rude, I don't know what is.
This only applies to big discounters thought. The smallish shops and bakers don't mind at all.
Personally I just throw them in those collection boxes for good things at airports and train stations when I leave the country.
Only works if the amount is less then 25 EUR but still it is much faster then cash.
Definitely not the case in Berlin where cash is king, German bank cards work often, and credit cards are rarely accepted.
I call them "red Netto" and "black Netto" because of the yellow-red and yellow-black color scheme. (The main color is, frustratingly, also the same.)
For my card (N26) I can still use the feature but I'll have to enter my pin. Still faster than sticking it into the slot.
Whatever you think. This is central Europe and visible Badly supported
In Austria people often just hand over more and say 'bast scho' (tip). Or otherwise pay a little bigger and take the change. In switzerland it's only the latter and less tipping but again nobody even looks at their own small coins.
Nearly everyone I know just has a glass at home where they throw the small coins in but never would really use them.
If anything, the CC statement gives you an objective summary of your spending, in case you want to recall something 10 months later, or budget for the future. When you pay only in cash, it will be a burden to keep the receipts, organized and readable, for that long.
Plus, isn't it less hassle to use a credit card rather than visit the ATM every so often?
Also, American banknotes with their identical size and color over all denominations are just incredibly impractical for anything but building those nice tidy stacks of drug money depicted in the movies. Cash payments in the United States are a terrible benchmark.
I pay with my card faster than the vast majority of people with cash. I also worked as a cashier during school, my favorite people were the older ones who'd just hand me their wallet so I could take the best mix of coins for the payment. Most people are horribly slow when trying to pay optimally.
Anyway, at least here in Germany the whole NFC thing seems to be taking off and card payments are even faster now.
e.g. when buying train or tram tickets the printing of the ticket takes much longer than the payment step.
In the US, I always wish they had non-cash lanes at grocery stores (especially at Costco, Walmart) because paying cash is almost always a super slow process.
Do prices and taxes in Germany for stuff usually end up in whole numbers? I think in that case it's easy to calculate total owed and be ready with the exact amount of cash.
So you add the numbers up, pay that much, and get 0.0x back, where x is the number of articles you bought, usually.
Your card info stays safe When you use your phone to pay in stores, Android Pay doesn’t send your actual credit or debit card number with your payment. Instead we use a virtual account number to represent your account info – so your card details stay safe and secure.
So, just as trackable as a credit card number. Or are virtual account numbers unique per transaction?
As a cash-paying German I think that the main appeal to me is that cash payments are a process you can easily understand in its entirety, whereas everything else comes with an infinite supply of unknowns big and small. Sure, it's easy to grasp the basic and get adequate working knowledge, but there will always be lines in the fine print, lines in the code and lines in the physical specs of the hardware that you never read and even if you did you may not have understood correctly. You don't have to worry about these things, but you could, and that seems to be enough for many to stick to what they know.
Also, not paying cash feels lazy, some stereotypes might apply. (Now I wonder about the possibility of a correlation between cash and the protestant/catholic divide still present as a cultural shadow of the past even amongst decidedly atheist Germans - payment customs in the nordics suggest otherwise though)
Also regarding your third point, anecdotally I have heard that many smaller shops/restaurants are now pushing for non-cash payments as it is more difficult for employees to steal that way.
In Sweden and Denmark there are many places where cash isn't accepted. Come to think of it, I was on a business trip to Frankfurt last week and the restaurant we ate at only accepted cards.
In fact, it is way faster than me trying to find the right coins for the chocolate bar.
1) CC is slow, at least in Switzerland. Like in Germany, efficiency is baked into the culture - people hate to wait on someone paying his chocolate bar with credit card. It's also not rare for people to show you that discontempt. This trains people into behaving.
2) Switzerland, as most of Germany, is a mostly urbanized place with good public transport and facilities close to where people live. Meaning, there's way less weekly mall-shopping going on than in less dense countries like the US or France. So, the average total price is lower since shopping trips are more frequent, often about every second or third day after work.
3) Security concerns. For a long time CC were as insecure as the US ones, with a simple swipe of the magnetic stripe being sufficient, and CC fraud was relatively frequent. So, many people have an instinct of only using CC when necessary, and if at all possible not in public places. Debit card on the other hand have always been relatively secure (6-digit pin code, 3 tries), so they are used more often, maybe more so than in the German example since Swiss banks have pushed them since around 20 years ago.