Recently, ads in the light rail that I catch have been promoting the ability to use your credit card to pay for your trips. It was only a few years ago that the government in New South Wales had finally got their act together to be able to offer a transaction card to travellers called the Opal card for all rail and bus services. You can top up the wallet it represents from the internet at home using your credit card. But now, they want you instead to use your credit card to pay for trips on the train.
The problem is that transaction cards of all types are riddled with problems. You'd think that paying for lunch would be easy, but it's often more difficult than it looks. For instance, I've been having problems recently with Commonwealth Bank of Australia point-of-sale terminals. My National Australia Bank transaction card (which is linked to my cheque account) is rejected most of the time with this brand of terminal, the one with a flat screen and a touch panel instead of buttons. So I have to pay with cash sometimes.
I always keep enough cash with me in my wallet to deal with this sort of problem but not long ago on one weekend at the restaurant I ate lunch in, where the total for two meals was $43, I saw that the POS terminal was one of the hated CBA models, so I opted for cash instead of EFTPOS. Then the cashier asked me if I had three dollars when I gave her a $50 note. I looked in my wallet and gave her $45 in banknotes, but you'd think that a popular suburban cafe would have the ability to give seven dollars in change. It seems that regardless of how you choose to pay for your meal you will end up having problems!
This discrete failure should alert us to the dangers of going all-electronic when it comes to making payments for things in the real world. Things will inevitably fuck-up if we go cashless and it will be at the most inopportune time that it happens. The trouble with the cashless crowd is that transactions often do not complete. I’ve already mentioned the problems I’ve personally had with CBA POS terminals. But at any time your cheque account might be refused by the POS terminal at a supermarket or your credit card transaction might lead to a message to the restaurant staff to get your to sign a chit to prove that the transaction was legitimate. These kinds of things happen all the time.
And yet the technorati with all their utopian visions of a completely cashless society are out there with their grand schemes and flawless plans for an improved economy that rides on the back of electricity above all else.
I had a long conversation with a couple of these evangelists earlier this year and they were full of ideas for making things better. When I remonstrated with them and noted that sometimes electronic transactions do not go through they were all, like, “They’re just teething problems. If the world were completely cashless then you bet your bottom dollar the system would work.”
But I don’t share their optimism. For me, the likelihood of someone not being able to catch a cab to get home late one night, or not being able to buy food when you are sick on a weekend, seems inevitable in a world where buskers would have to get you to log into a website to make donations and homeless people would be completely at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats in government departments. Cash is a material guarantee of service in a world where networks are always under threat all the time from nameless actors with questionable motives.
The problem is that transaction cards of all types are riddled with problems. You'd think that paying for lunch would be easy, but it's often more difficult than it looks. For instance, I've been having problems recently with Commonwealth Bank of Australia point-of-sale terminals. My National Australia Bank transaction card (which is linked to my cheque account) is rejected most of the time with this brand of terminal, the one with a flat screen and a touch panel instead of buttons. So I have to pay with cash sometimes.
I always keep enough cash with me in my wallet to deal with this sort of problem but not long ago on one weekend at the restaurant I ate lunch in, where the total for two meals was $43, I saw that the POS terminal was one of the hated CBA models, so I opted for cash instead of EFTPOS. Then the cashier asked me if I had three dollars when I gave her a $50 note. I looked in my wallet and gave her $45 in banknotes, but you'd think that a popular suburban cafe would have the ability to give seven dollars in change. It seems that regardless of how you choose to pay for your meal you will end up having problems!
This discrete failure should alert us to the dangers of going all-electronic when it comes to making payments for things in the real world. Things will inevitably fuck-up if we go cashless and it will be at the most inopportune time that it happens. The trouble with the cashless crowd is that transactions often do not complete. I’ve already mentioned the problems I’ve personally had with CBA POS terminals. But at any time your cheque account might be refused by the POS terminal at a supermarket or your credit card transaction might lead to a message to the restaurant staff to get your to sign a chit to prove that the transaction was legitimate. These kinds of things happen all the time.
And yet the technorati with all their utopian visions of a completely cashless society are out there with their grand schemes and flawless plans for an improved economy that rides on the back of electricity above all else.
I had a long conversation with a couple of these evangelists earlier this year and they were full of ideas for making things better. When I remonstrated with them and noted that sometimes electronic transactions do not go through they were all, like, “They’re just teething problems. If the world were completely cashless then you bet your bottom dollar the system would work.”
But I don’t share their optimism. For me, the likelihood of someone not being able to catch a cab to get home late one night, or not being able to buy food when you are sick on a weekend, seems inevitable in a world where buskers would have to get you to log into a website to make donations and homeless people would be completely at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats in government departments. Cash is a material guarantee of service in a world where networks are always under threat all the time from nameless actors with questionable motives.
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