Cash Is A Hassle

If I were ever to get mugged the best you're going to get from me is a phone and maybe some random change. I rarely carry cash on me. I don't make it to the bank very often and I, for the most part, don't find the need to have anything but a credit card on me. When I'm out in the real world, I'm either paying for things with a credit card or my phone (which is just linked up to a credit card).

If for some reason I do have cash on me there are times when people don't want to take it. It's more work for them, and you have to hope the computer tells them the correct change to give back because you know math is hard.

Recently, I had to pay for something that was 71 cents, so I checked my pockets to see if I happened to have any change or even a dollar. I'm a guy so finding random things in my pocket isn't a surprise.

I did have a $5 bill... Shocking! If not, I would have just used the debit card. Upon handing over the $5 bill, the person made a stink about not having anything smaller. In general, I may carry around a few singles for tips, or if I need to use a vending machine. I didn't have a dollar in this instance, and it's amazing I even had a $5.

There are a lot of small businesses that try to make you spend $5 or more to use a credit card, which is illegal, but I get it, those credit card processing fees the business has to pay sucks. As I said in a previous post, small businesses should look into cryptocurrency to replace this. Even though many of these businesses would prefer you pay with cash so that they don't get charged a fee to run a card, there are also issues with handling physical money in a business transaction too.

First off, cash is gross! If you think about where your bills have been and how many people have touched them, you'd never handle them again. A one dollar bill will come in contact with almost fourteen thousand people in its 25-year lifespan. Most physical currencies are crawling with bacteria so if you're touching money all the time, wash your hands!

Printing/minting money is expensive! It costs $1.62 to make a dollar's worth of nickels, and $1.66 to make a dollar's worth of pennies. Coins are often just tossed in a bowl or piggy bank and stored until the vessel is full and they can be cashed in for dollars. And, I know people often joke about tossing pennies in the trash.

Cash is anonymous! Drug dealers, bartenders and anyone doing businesses they would like not to have a record of need the transaction completed in cash. The dark web might be using cryptocurrency for some illegal activities, but cash is still the go-to king.

Cash is easily stealable! In a city where you could get mugged, the criminal would rather have something untraceable over a credit card. Can you imagine transferring Bitcoin to a mugger? It's also common for employees at the retail level to steal cash. Why do so many businesses have signs about making sure you received a receipt? Because it's easy for someone to discount a product, you pay full price, and they pocket the cash at the end of their shift. No one wants those receipts (unless for tax reasons) plus they also contain strange ink chemicals.

I've seen plenty of businesses go cash only, but I've also seen a lot of companies saying they don't accept cash. Haymarket Brewery in Michigan is one of them; they pay their wait staff a decent living wage, so they don't allow tips, and therefore they don't take cash at all. I have to imagine this speeds us closing at night as you don't have a till to countdown and you also avoid those conversations with the staff about why they are $20 short.

So if there are so many drawbacks to using cash, it makes a lot of sense that a new form of payment could take hold. As long as I can give/transfer some amount or something that we agree on for goods, it doesn't matter if it's cash. Cryptocurrency being all digital is going to make it a lot easier for business owners to track and the government to make sure there is less money transferring hands without them getting their cut.