A journey rediscovering the magic of money
September 5, 2024 / October 7, 2024 by Carla Francome | 2 Comments on My month using cash
“Please tap your card on the card reader” it says. “Tap”. This is the way I paid for everything until recently, maybe you do too. Tap, tap, tap. Sometimes I do it with a Tesco reward card first. “Beep!” And then, “tap”. Maybe with the card that’s loaded on my phone. Hover your phone, turn it for face ID, hover your phone again. “Beep!” Tap with a card and then the shutters open on the tube. Paying with plastic. Lots of friends tell me they hardly ever use cash these days either, it’s just kind of happened. Can you remember the last time you paid with cash, even when the card option was available? Until recently, I couldn’t.
It all started with signing the back of a card didn’t it? And then remember when chip and pin came in! That was exciting, but would it be safe without someone checking the scrawl of our signatures?! Most likely. And then contactless payments, boom! It had become even easier than buying something on amazon. Not even two clicks, just one tap! The amount you can spend with contactless has gone up quite a bit too. In March 2021, it increased from £45 to £100. £100! I paid £72 contactless recently for a physio session. It felt wild. Oh, what a revolution! A revolution in easiness.
Recent figures show that the number of payments made by shoppers using cash fell by 7% in 2023 compared to 2022 and that 40% of people now live cashless, relying on bank cards and smartphones for payment – with the most common age group being those under 24. But is it good for us that it’s so convenient? Where is this all leading us, and who are we going to be excluding if places stop accepting cash?
I’m currently reading the bestseller “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, and there’s a part where one of the main characters, Marx, who creates computer games, goes to visit his mum, Mrs Watanabe, in Tokyo. She “loved hand painting, quilting, and the discipline of woven textiles” we’re told, but was worried that these were all a dying art. “Computers make everything too easy”, she says. It stayed with me. Had paying for things become too easy? And at what cost to all of us?
I started looking into it and read that using a debit or credit card can increase spending by up to 40%. Articles show it’s easier to budget with cash , and the huge popularity of viral #cashstuffing videos on TikTok are hypnotic, with Gen Zs budgeting by putting money in different envelopes for different spends. I liked the idea of spending cash to be more aware of what I was spending, and hopefully spending a bit less with it!
I started to think of a few other costs of not ever having cash on me, like the fact that I never had change to give tips in a cafe, and how my children, my son A, 9, and daughter D, 7, didn’t really have much connection with money directly because I never had change for pocket money, so just paid for things on card. And then, how I never had a pound for the shopping trolley in the supermarket, or the lockers at the swimming pool. I’d become totally out of practice with using cash. My dad had paid me back some money he owed me in cash, a nice round £250, and it had just sat in my sock drawer. I honestly didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
We took a family holiday to Guernsey and took some cash out. And even I knew this was too good to sit in a sock drawer. It was beautiful. In fact, cash is always interesting to look at isn’t it. There on the notes was the Queen, our late Queen, but different! We all looked at the notes and compared them to English pounds.
I took a trip to the tourist information centre, where a lovely woman called Julie opened the safe and took out each note and coin she could find for me to see. I loved how Guernsey has a pound note- it reminded me of playing Monopoly. Julie told me that locals found a pound coin too heavy, so they’d decided on a note instead. I wondered about the man on the one pound note- it turned out he was called Daniel De Lisle Brock, who in the early 19th century decided Guernsey should issue its own bank notes to deal with rising debt from the Napoleonic wars. It meant there would be no interest to pay, leading to substantial savings, and it was a great success. Cash was leading me to different stories.
I also found I needed cash for the laundry room at the apartments we were staying at, so had to get some change. Putting the pounds in the slot with my daughter reminded me how much my children love the arcades and 2P machine on Bournemouth pier. Using coins again was reminding me of some fun times when I was a kid too. Computers had made things easy- but was this more fun?
Heading back to the UK, we passed one of those mesmerising coin spinners that my kids love. “This wouldn’t be much fun with a debit card” I considered. I thought about the £250 cash that my dad had paid me back that was sitting in my sock drawer at home. I needed to get it out and start using that instead of my debit card.
It was reassuringly heavy when I had a decent number of coins in my wallet. And I was very relieved to find that one of my favourite local cafes, Leafy Bean, still took cash. Using coins and notes also started off some nice conversations. A chap in the local Indian takeaway told me I was the only one who had used cash for ages. And I was surprised how many people just handed me the card reader without even expecting I might pay cash. It seemed a lot of us were out of practice.
But there were definite pluses- I always had a pound for the swimming lockers, and I could easily leave tips and pay for licensed taxi rides. I also found I was much more aware of how much I was spending. I worked out how much change I needed when paying for things, and just felt more involved in it all. I definitely spent less as a result. I put back an impulse buy in Boots, and just generally felt much more “connected” with my money. Before with cards, it had felt I was a bit removed from it, I realised. I enjoyed it too, the arithmetic, handling cash. I liked giving my kids pocket money every Saturday, and thanking places when they took cash. It just all felt so much more wholesome somehow. I decided I was definitely going to keep using it.
But then trying to pay cash around London, I was quickly surprised by how many places didn’t take it. One nice looking coffee shop in Hampstead called Euphorium said they wouldn’t be able to accept my £5 note. The barista shrugged. “Lots of people ask us if we take cash, but the bosses have decided that we won’t, you won’t be able to get through to them”. Well I wasn’t feeling euphoric in the Euphorium. I tried another cafe nearby, a place called karma bread, and they also didn’t take cash. “Well here’s some karma” I thought. “You won’t be getting my dough. That’s the way the cookie crumbles!” (I was at least proud of myself for the dreadful jokes).
And these two cafes in Hampstead aren’t alone. Gail’s also doesn’t take cash, I discovered (so they won’t be getting my dough for their sourdough either), neither do 167 of Asda’s petrol stations, the press has reported. And Tesco has recently announced that 40 of its supermarket cafes have stopped taking cash payments, much to shoppers’ annoyance, with many more predicted to follow suit.
I passed this wonderful sign at South Kensington Tube station. “How can we accept this”. It’s how I felt about places that didn’t take cash. How can we accept this? Is that also how they felt about our money too? There was work to do.
In a Post Office shop one day with my father, who’s 80, we both paid in cash, and it felt so wholesome! I also realised something. My dad loves using cash because he finds it easier to keep track of his spending, and I needed to use it to make sure he could keep using it. If we didn’t do something soon, more and more places would stop accepting cash. And then where would my dad be, and the other 5 million people in the UK who rely solely on cash? A fifth of us use cash some of the time, and I realised it would help if more of us use it where we could. Also, I read that if everywhere went cashless, banks would have the monopoly, so could charge us what they liked for using their cards. It became apparent that we all need cash to be accepted, whether we personally use it or not!
I soon found I wasn’t alone in feeling cross about all this. A friend saw saw this poster at a festival in Palmers Green, and I signed up to the facebook group Keep Cash UK. There were nearly 70,000 members, reporting their stories of places that did and didn’t accept cash. I shared some of my stories, and pleasingly, received many good puns on my post about Gail’s and how they wouldn’t get my bread, or dough for that matter. “Crumbs!” One said. “They should accept both cash and cards, it’s the yeast they could do!” Said another. At least we could have a chortle about it. They had some good advice too, saying it was important to do Google reviews.
So the next time it happened, I did! In fact, it wasn’t a place that didn’t accept cash, but it was a coffee shop with digital screens that couldn’t give out receipts. Turns out on Google reviews you can include selfies, and even captions on the selfies, eg: “me not happy when receipt didn’t come through”. It cheered me immensely to have had my voice heard. Even on just a Google review, and I vowed to do a lot more.
Since I’d started having cash, a thriving local economy had sprung into action at home. A and D could make money by doing chores, and they were getting £5 pocket money on a Saturday. One weekend, they decided to do a lemonade stand on a sunny day. We enjoyed going to the shops to buy lemons, and working out the amount we’d get in change. I realised this was going to be great for my kids’ maths too. It was also fun when neighbours popped by, and with cash exchanging hands.
Sure using cash was more effort, but it was more satisfying too. One of the things that author and financial broker Brett Scott has written about is how when we pay with plastic, “large institutions get between our economic interactions, which means it’s accompanied by a change in the feel or vibe of our society. As Visa and MasterCard insert themselves between every act of exchange, everything starts to feel more gentrified”. I enjoyed cash swapping hands in our neighbourhood without the banks sticking their noses in.
It’s not always easy to explain this though, I soon found out. Buying a cup of tea with cash the following week, I looked at the nice lady taking my money and said “isn’t this amazing! Me and you are doing this transaction now without any involvement of the banks! It’s just you, me and the cash! No banks at all!” She smiled and nodded politely, but I could tell from the look in her eyes that she thought I was absolutely off my rocker. It didn’t help that I was wearing a yellow rain mac when it wasn’t raining and my hair was squiwiff. I made a mental note, that although it’s good to talk to people about using cash, it’s important not to go off from the deep end, and to sound at least half sane with it.
You can follow Carla’s journey going cashless on “X” here and linked in here