Australia's transition to a cashless society is underway — but not everyone wins when we get rid of cash
Australia's transition to a cashless society is underway — but not everyone wins when we get rid of cash
Phasing out cash has serious implications for privacy, safety and financial exclusion among marginalised communities.
Before we go cashless, fees need to be 0%. Start by fixing that.
We need to use EFTPOS instead of visa and MasterCard.
0% for banking and spending your own money.
Businesses should just factor merchant fees into sticker price much the same way they would (should?) be factoring in the cost of carrying cash, as consumers we wouldn't even notice. And yes, cash does have a cost (time taken traveling to/from the bank or ATM, risk of loss or theft on the way etc).
Don't pay bank account fees as an individual, please.. there are so many ways to get free banking.
It's not free to run a payments network. So who should pay for it? Tax payer funded?
Who pays to design, print/mint, transport cash? It's always been taxpayers
Two options:
Don't go cashless.
Go cashless but fees = $0.
Idgaf how it works, but it's asinine to have a $4 a month account keeping fee and pay per transaction to store and spend your own money. If it gets any worse I'll be pulling all my cash out and going cash only for everything.
Coincidentally, while reading this over my morning coffee earlier, an email reminder came through from my daughter's school, for the Father's Day stall tomorrow.
It got me thinking there must be millions of tiny little use cases for cash, where tap and pay just isn't feasible.
Not sure what the answer is, but I do believe a cash-reduced society should be the ultimate goal.
But privacy is also a concern. I really wish my bank would introduce a tap and pay app, rather than me having to use Google Pay.
I refuse to use Google's services. They are not a bank, they're an advertising company who's major goal includes knowing everything about everyone. They can fuck off. I agree, the banks need their own apps so we're not beholden to a foreign surveillance corporation to use contact-less phone based transactions.
Yeah, I'm on a de-Googling journey myself right now. It's not easy, as I (naively, maaaany years ago) hosted my domain on Gsuite, so getting everything out without disruption is (intentionally, on Google's part) difficult.
I really need to just sit down, map out everything I still have with them, and work out the right order of execution to unpick everything. It's a real PITA.
Cashless reduced society still leaves millions of people without access, no thanks!
I didn't say cashless - I said cash-reduced. We need to remove cash from situations where it shouldn't be a requirement, such as gambling venues. While privacy is a fundamental human right, it provides criminals the ability to hide behind a cloak of anonymity.
I believe the goal should be as cashless as we can be, without disadvantaging groups of people that can only use cash.
But that would require a government brave enough to create strong enough laws to safeguard our personal data from abuse and misuse. Not only to stop Big Tech and other megacorps from using our data without consent, but also to punish those responsible for not protecting our data properly, including deletion when it's no longer required (fucking Latitude).
Might as well hope to win the big Powerball prize - both seem equally likely right now...
My sons after school care had some fundraising stalls run by the kids with cookies, raffles etc. The first day was cash on,y and many parents didn’t carry any. Day 2, they had set up a cashless payment method.
There’s voucher systems for school stalls beings used. You buy a $5 voucher through the app and then all the gifts are either $5 or $10 at the stall. Works out cashless and pretty handy.
Yeah, I dunno why our school isn't doing that yet. There's an app where we can place and pay for lunch orders. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to introduce a pre-paid voucher system, to use at these things.
We can skip cashless and and jump straight to moneyless with the current economy /s
plenty of people are already there
You have to be able to have a backup. Right now if you lose your bank cards, your bank might not even have a face to face branch to get cash from, and it might take 2 weeks in the post. It’s also harder for older people to keep up with the technology changes, also for people who don’t have access to the internet (or internet banking).
It’s great for a lot of us (I haven’t used cash in about 2 years I reckon), but I am worried people will be left behind if there’s no other payment system in place.
This sounds petty but I like talking illicit substances on occasion. Generally, these are only paid for in cash, I know some people take bank transfers but I don't want a paper trail leading in either direction.