Cash

Phil Gyford has a fascinating chart in his post Laboriously keeping track; it charts his yearly cash withdrawls from his bank account:

I suspect my chart would look very similar. I very rarely need cash: the only regular need is for my haircuts at Ray’s, and for visit to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market (and even there, the merchants increasingly accept credit cards).

On our trip to Europe last month I withdrew cash only twice (which was good, because there’s a $4 surcharge from international ATMs every time I do), and in both cases it was more “we should probably have some cash” than any specific need.

Go back 30 years to my first trips to Europe and I would have relied on ATMs (or, before then, travellers cheques) to fuel the trip, and finding an ATM would have been the first task in any new place.

(In Belgium, we discovered, the banks are getting out of the ATM business, and have formed an Interac-like consortium to create centralized ATM kiosks under the CASH brand.)

Today it’s more common to find “cards only” than it is to find “cash only,” you can pay for trams, trains, and buses with a tap of the iPhone, and it’s only edge cases, like leaving cash for cleaners, where cash is actually needed.

It seems possible that mine will be the last generation to have used cash for the bulk of our lives; it would not surprise me if it disappeared entirely in the not too distant future.