Monday, 31 October 2011
Plastic
This 'cashless society' lark is developing into one of life's minor, but intense, irritations. Popping into one of those little M&S take-away outlets this lunchtime, I was expecting to be in and out in no time with my sandwich - but no! Every single person ahead of me paid with plastic - and none of them was buying anything more than a single sandwich. Even the fastest card machine is a whole lot slower than a simple cash handover, and the cumulative effect is to slow things down dramatically. Who are these people that they don't carry a couple of quid in cash on them? (I didn't recognise any of them as members of the royal family.) And why do retailers allow card payments for the paltriest sums, thereby ensuring slower service for all? Ah progress, progress...
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Perhaps you have to be rich these days to use real money. It means going to a bank or at least to an ATM and withdrawing actual cash (or being told you can't). If like most folks these days you don't have any money then at least you can buy some food by paying with plastic and juggling the CC accounts. The poor use plastic and pay astromonical interest on it, the rich use cash and go interest-free - the opposite of the effect intended, I'd guess.
ReplyDeleteAn intriguing theory Mark - unintended consequences again...
ReplyDeleteBut would poor payers in plastic frequent M & S? Up in more northern parts, they tend to go to Tesco's or the Co-op, the latter being, despite its noble origins and aims, whoppingly expensive.
ReplyDeleteNever mind the fact that so many of those who use cash machines seem to be chronically befuddled about how to use them, to me they are a source of an incremental cummulative stress that will ultimately end in revolution or Armageddon or something. Have you noticed how we all go through a certain anxiety about whether the damn things will accept our digital supplications? We stare at them nervously, praying they won't decline us and bring shame on our kin for generations to come, even if we know in some non-virtual reality there is plenty of cash to cover it. I always feel my relationship with the shop clerk has been downgraded from wealthy lord of the manor to nervous supplicant. It's enough to make a chap revisit Lenin on class war.
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