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Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

Really? That's pretty surprising - I live in Barcelona, and I use cards 99% of the time, and in the UK it was even easier. Even taxis here have card machines, and every small shop definitely does. The only holdouts are the occasional tiny old wine bar here and there, but even most of them have moved with the times.

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Unfortunately I didn't find more actual stats, but there is a report from Deutsche Bundesbank (German Federal Bank) from 2014 which states that in 2014 the share of cash payments in Germany was 79.1% and only 1.3% credit card transactions.[0, page 27] If I remember correctly, there is no other European country with such a low percentage of credit card transactions.

[0] https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publication... [PDF]

The relevant page is 31 (pdf-page 33), containing a figure "Share of payment instruments broken down into various transaction amount categories in 2014, 2011 and 2008". In particular, 96% of transactions below 5€ were in cash, and 90% for transactions between 5 and 20€.

A breakdown by age group is on page 33. Unsurprisingly, young people pay by card more often than older people.

Various other figure breaking down card/cash usage along different lines are on the subsequent pages. Poorer people use cash for a larger percentage of their transactions than richer people.

Page 63 breaks down usage by occasion/purpose of payment (gas/restaurant/retail/...).

Lastly, 97% of Germans have a girocard (debit card), but only 1 in 3 have a credit card.

Barcelona may be special within Spain because it's such a huge tourist destination. This statistic (from Mastercard) says that only 16% of payments are cashless in Spain: http://www.mastercardadvisors.com/_assets/pdf/MasterCardAdvi...

Singapore, Netherlands, France and Sweden are way ahead (~60%). I'm a bit surprised that the US is only 45% cashless.

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