More cafés, buses and even doctors' offices now say 'card only.' Supporters say it's faster and safer. Others say it quietly shuts out anyone who is older, poorer, or simply doesn't trust handing their whole life to an app. Is a cashless world progress — or are we being pushed somewhere we never agreed to go?
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Add your commentMy mother is 88 and terrified of card machines. Last week a young waiter sighed at her like she was an idiot for holding people up. She came home and cried. That's what 'progress' looks like from her chair.
I'm 74. I budget with envelopes. £40 for food, £20 for petrol, and when the envelope is empty I stop. Try doing that with a card you can't see emptying. This isn't 'old fashioned,' it's the only thing that kept me out of debt my whole life.
Whatever side you're on, do one thing this week: pay an older person's small bill in cash and watch their shoulders drop. Sometimes the fight isn't about money at all. It's about not being made to feel like a problem.
Cash is legal money issued by the government. The day a shop can refuse the country's own money is the day something has gone very wrong, and nobody asked the rest of us.
The charity tin, the busker, the church collection, the kid washing cars on the corner. None of that survives a cashless world. We're not just losing coins, we're losing the small kindnesses that ran on them.
There's a quiet cruelty in telling a widow who buried her husband, raised three kids and paid tax for 50 years that her money is now 'inconvenient.' She earned the right to pay how she likes.
It's not nostalgia when the power goes out and the 'card only' café can't sell a single coffee while the bloke with a tenner walks out happy.
I work in a bank. The number of older customers crying at my desk because their branch closed and the nearest one is 14 miles away would shock you. We are abandoning people and calling it innovation.
People act like this is about coffee. It's about whether you can buy and sell without permission. Once everything is digital, everything is switch-off-able. Think about that before you tap.
every transaction tracked, recorded and sellable. you'll defend it right up until the day an algorithm decides your account is 'suspicious' on a friday and you can't buy bread till monday
My grandson explained that I'm 'free' to use cash, shops are just 'free' to refuse it. Funny kind of freedom where only one side ever gets the choice.
Cash is how I teach my grandkids money is real. You hand over the note, you feel it leave. Tap-and-go raises a generation who think money is infinite until it isn't.
67 and I'll die with cash in my pocket. Not because I'm stubborn. Because I lived through a bank freezing my account over an error that took eleven weeks to fix. Cash doesn't 'glitch.'
Fine, but at least put a sign on the door so my mum doesn't fill a basket then get humiliated at the register. It's the disrespect, not just the policy.
Sweden went nearly cashless and is now BACKPEDALLING and telling citizens to keep cash for emergencies. The countries furthest down this road are the ones getting nervous. Maybe listen to them.
Let's be honest, half of you saying 'cash forever' also pay for everything by tapping your phone. We voted for this with our convenience, one tap at a time.
honestly the convenience is great until you're old or broke or both, and then suddenly the modern world has a velvet rope and you're on the wrong side of it
Worked retail for 30 years. Cash 'gone missing,' tills not balancing, robberies — card only genuinely makes staff safer and faster. I get the worry but some of this nostalgia ignores why shops changed.
I run a small café. Card-only saved me. I'm not the villain here, I'm a 61 year old trying not to get robbed at closing time. Some days I think the people lecturing me have never had to count a till at midnight.
Devil's advocate: my dad insisted on cash, hid it around the house, got burgled, lost £3,000 in an afternoon. Cash isn't magically 'safe' either. There's no option here without a downside.
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