Opening my wallet, I am down to my last five dollars. Dog-eared leftovers from a foreign holiday that I keep forgetting to take to the bank, they have somehow ended up being the only physical money I always carry, now there are so few places to use the British folding stuff.
Our village pub was for years a cash-only enterprise, possibly as a means of deterring customers from outside the village (long, gloriously eccentric story), and I keep a few pound coins rattling around the car for shopping trolleys. However, using actual money feels mildly eccentric in most places now, or even faintly shady: Increasingly cafes and bars are adopting “no cash” rules upfront to save the hassle of carting their takings to some faraway bank branch.
Half of us have recently been somewhere that either did not accept cash or positively discouraged it, according to a survey by the ATM network Link. Since most people long ago switched to tapping a card reader, what is the problem?
Illustration: Yusha
Well, there is the fact that, as a British House of Commons Treasury Committee report suggested this week, it is the most vulnerable who still depend on cash: older people either terrified of being scammed or struggling to get to grips with apps, people whose credit rating is too trashed to get a bank account, adults with learning disabilities who can more easily understand that when cash is gone it is really gone and women squirrelling away “running away money” their partners do not know about. (One of the most upsetting stories the members of parliament heard was from a woman whose abusive partner had withheld the electronic bill payment for the kids’ school lunches: The school did not let her pay in cash, the only way she had of getting around his control of their account.)
Then there is the fact that, as Spain discovered during this week’s massive power outage, cash might no longer be king, but when the worst happens, it is still a critical spare to the heir. Sweden backtracked last year on plans to become a cashless society amid fears of becoming less resilient to saboteurs and hostile actors.
Last but not least is the faintly embarrassed “Am I mad to think this?” sense triggered by the speed of the US’ descent into dystopia, that having a source of money no ill-intentioned future government could track or summarily freeze for political reasons is an underappreciated safety net.
Clinging on to cash is one of those strange issues uniting traditionalists suspicious of change — tellingly, Reform UK’s manifesto last year promised to stop the UK from becoming a cashless society — with conspiracy theorists convinced the global elite is after their assets, radicals of all stripes, small business owners sick of being charged by banks for card transactions and anti-poverty charities saying that cash is a lifeline for people on tight budgets.
Even Gen Z, in theory more open to digitalized lives, have taken to the TikTok and Instagram-fueled cult of “cash stuffing,” or disciplining your spending by taking out a week’s cash and sorting it into different envelopes for specific purposes. Once the envelope is empty, the spending stops.
Thousands follow the big cash stuffers’ faintly hypnotic videos of them counting out crisp tenners and stashing them neatly into pastel folders. Like all those videos of influencers sorting their cereals into labeled glass jars, it speaks to a need for control, order and a sort of reassuring homeliness, reminiscent of your granny keeping the week’s housekeeping in a biscuit tin. (Although, much like the biscuit tins, cash stuffing at home must be a boon for burglars.)
As with the physical habit of reading newsprint, once confidently predicted to be dead by now, the long-term trajectory toward digital might be clear, but letting go of something you can physically hold in your hand takes far longer than anyone thinks.
Banks would love a cashless society, of course: The less physical currency swilling around the system, the easier it is for them to shut down all their branches and go wholly digital, forcing reluctant customers to phone a call center or more likely message a chatbot if they need help. So much cheaper than maintaining an anchoring, human-employing presence on high streets where there is little else left but vape shops.
However, let us just say that the past few decades have not given me enormous confidence in the social worth of unquestioningly doing whatever banks want. Which is why I would be hanging on, for the foreseeable future, to an increasingly pointless handful of cash.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist.
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