That's what they do: "Ted Anderson said he went into a restaurant in Japan to find it "cash only and staff calculating the totals on paper".

The issue is that many people don't carry cash at all these days (at least here in the UK)

That's why I purposefully try to pay most things with cash.

Yes, I get it, paying with card is easy and kinda nice, but if cash goes away entirely, we have an even bigger problem. So I will be the one who uses it in the hopes to have a miniscule impact on it not going away as fast.

Same thing goes with firefox and not letting the webkit mafia take over.

But people would if outages with cash backups were frequent enough. On a side note, I am baffled by the number of otherwise activist people to whom I expound about the big problems of a cashless society who just shrug to say "hey, what can you do?"

Yeah, always wise to keep a couple of bank notes in your wallet, just in case.

The worst I see these days is people who carry neither cards nor cash, just their phones because "anyway I have Apple Pay/Google Wallet for contactless"... and then they use that to buy an electronic ticket on their phone for their commute to work. The day they lose their phone far from home they are instantly stranded and homeless, and they can't call anyone for help because they don't actually know anyone's phone number.

Cash is still pretty common in Japan and Germany, so some markets wouldn't even notice a difference.

There aren't that all that many US store clerks I'd trust to do calculations on paper, either. I'm guessing things are different in Japan.

In my (thankfully) long-ago days as a young person working retail, I had a coworker who could not figure out 10% of a given quantity even with a calculator.