2022-07-16

Re: Cash-ocalypse

~stacksmith has opinions about being able to pay in cash, or rather not:

> ... mumbling impatiently that I should really get Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, like a real person.

gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-07-11.gmi

Me not being a "real person" then, I couldn't agree more. :)

In my humble opinion paying cash is a nice puzzle piece of resistance. I routinely pay cash for almost everything, that I buy locally. I have bought a number of fairly expensive things (for my personal definition of fairly expensive, that is) and payed several of them cash, e.g. a new motorcycle, an old car, a vinyl turntable plus amplifier and speakers. Fortunately none of those vendors objected to cash. The point is: paying cash does to my knowledge not neccesarily produce a digital record of who pays how much for what to whom and where. Even more so, if this is a second hand deal from a private person. The authorities do not need to know, whether I spend my cash on more or rather less questionable things. The assumption always seems to be "more questionable things", like weapons, hard drugs and child porn. Well, I don't. And I estimate more than 95% of folks don't. But of course, if you jail them all, the questionable 5% will be with them. Don't get caught by this flawed reasoning!

Another anecdote to share: At a lab place, where we spent weeks to get some piece of equipment to work properly, a fair bit of small change had accumulated in the kitchen. So I counted it, replaced it with some more reasonable change and took it with me. I went to a fairly large bank, operating world wide. I happened to have my bank account there at the time. I said to the lady at the counter, that I had a pile of small change and I would like to change this to more reasonable units.

She looked at me with disgust and said in a succint and arrogant way "We don't do that any more!" I mean, the gesture was certainly worthy of a movie. However, I had expected something like this, so I said "Well, this is bank X, right? And I'm quite certain that this place can change coins into bigger units of currency, no? Is this a forgotten art?" She insisted. Then I said with the biggest smile I could muster "Well, if changing small change in larger change is a forgotten art, then I would like to add this stuff to my bank account, please!" She gave up at this point, despite obviously not being amused. So this round was mine.

Now, in hindsight, if she had said something like "look, I'm not supposed to be doing this, but here is the plastic stuff and the papers ... if you sort and roll it, I'm fine." But she didn't.

So? Stay rude! Use cash!

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