As we are increasingly becoming a cashless society with credit cards and digital transactions becoming the primary forms of money transfer, i am surprised and don't understand to see many people totally rely on their cards and phones to pay and never carry even a dollar ?!?!?
I still carry cash between $200-$500 depending what i am doing and also use credit card from time to time so i think i use both equally but never rely 100% on digital transactions.
Can't wait to hear from others. Is USA or wherever you are is becoming like Australia?
In rural areas at least it's still common in the US to have some cash on hand. Or you know, a chicken in a box in the back of the truck when you're heading out to trade "something for something" - maybe you need some potatoes and have a chicken that's past laying eggs but still fit for the soup pot. That chicken is as good as cash if the woman who grew the potatoes agrees. I have sometimes traded rights to tap my few sugar maple trees for first call on some fresh eggs to be taken later on in spring. I'd have let the tapping rights for free, mind you, but that's not how it's done, it's something for something... and cash isn't always seen as any better than something one can eat without making a run to the store.
Still it's surprising to me to see that tiny shops in rural areas now mostly take credit or debit cards. I guess they've realized that the foot traffic is not always from "the neighborhood" and that lots of people are more used to paying with some form of plastic these days.
The old general store in the nearest village to my place eventually took debit and credit cards. Before that as a regular shopper there you just ran a tab and wrote them a check at the end of the month. They stopped extending credit though when some newer seasonal residents started skating through two seasons on their August bill by closing up their residence before the usual September exodus, and figuring that somewhere around the following May or June was soon enough to pay off some "trivial" grocery bill of a few hundred bucks. It stressed the grocer but she put up with it to have their trade during the high season in summer.
Ugh. File under why we can't have nice things. The store finally changed hands and the new owners ran it into the ground while refusing to continue a postal service contract (there went half the foot traffic), plus accepting plastic or cash to settle all trades at point of purchase, but meanwhile completely misunderstanding their customer base. They wanted to sell cranberry goat cheese and crostini but some of the customer base had budgets much more attuned to white sandwich bread and peanut butter.
Those customers were also more attuned to the old ways: promptly settling up with cash at the end of the month. In the newer scheme of things
they started coming in just once a month, cash in hand, but they would buy like one log of cranberrry goat cheese, a container of some exotic soup made on the premises and maybe a box of crackers. A sad tale, that. The place had been in business for over 170 years, until someone had a rather inauthentic vision for "an old-time country store" but no sensible business plan suited to the customers' wallets and shopping habits. Now we're all having to slide plastic or pay cash at point of purchase in supermarkets 10 or 15 miles away.
