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>> If the power goes out, I can't get any cash. I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know, including my elderly relatives.

Well, that is well on your single data point, here is mine: I live in a bad weather prone area of the united states. I do not know _anyone_ that does _not_ have a meaningful amount of cash in the house for bad weather. Yes, stores here operate with low/no power or communications and use cash. I agree with the poster who noted that it provides a localized resilience. It is your fault, not anyone else's, that you do not have some currency.

Truth be told, I have kept about a weeks worth of spending in cash for decades in the house, just in case, and I have indeed had to use it during long term power outages. Heck, in my area just last week, all of my banks ATMs were down for the entire week due to a software issue after an upgrade (I am not making this up). While I might not have needed cash, it shows the fragility of our systems we rely on.

I also keep cash around. I always put $200 in my wallet around payday and spend it like petty cash. Next payday, I make sure it's $200 again. I always fill my gas tank at 1/2 too. I also have 2 5 gallon containers of fresh water in my garage. It's simple preparedness that is fairly low effort.

My BIL does the low effort stuff. Extremely low effort. He has a bunch of canned fish. Oh, and he got solar panels. But didn't know that they don't actually work if the grid goes down. So we had a regional power cut a few weeks back and he was astonished that his house went dark. He was about to complain to the company that installed it when I reminded him that I told him he had to pay extra for a grid-side battery and some additional circuitry, and he replied that he didn't think he needed that, and would save the money.

At least he had his canned fish. I gave him some candles.

I think you might be surprised by how many larger stores and grocery stores especially are prepared to operate in low power or no power conditions if necessary.

Another side effect of this DC rule will be to ensure that more are prepared too.

Yup I’ve seen a large grocery store keep business going during an extended power outage with hand-written ledgers and cash transactions. Customers kept coming in to shop despite the outage.

It should be a requirement. From all the national security bullshit I've seen this must be the easiest way to permanently turn a country into chaos.

Also funny is losing your id card/passport and your bank card/credit card simultaneously. You then need to get a new card from your bank that requires a valid id and you need to get a new id card which costs money. And no driving! "Gladly" this process takes so much time you can usually borrow money or pay it for you.

The restaurant I worked at years ago would bust out those old slider-carbon-copy things for credit cards during power outages.

Both my credit and debit cards are instant prints that don't have the embossing those require. Running the old carbon copier over them wouldn't show anything except maybe a vague outline of my credit card.

Apple Card doesn't even have a number printed on it (because you can request a new # ad hoc, via the app), let alone embossed. Just my name, and (without walking to get the physical card) Apple logo, and I think a Goldman-Sachs logo. If the power goes out, the card's only utility would be if you need a thin piece of titanium for your McGyvering.

I remember getting mine in the mail and being utterly astonished by that. My Apple Card number has been replaced three times and the fact that I mentally have to tell myself "no, you're not getting a new card, so don't be looking for it in the mail" is so much different than any other card (debit or credit) I've ever had.

Weirdly enough, replacing my Chase debit card is so much easier with an Apple Wallet because it instantly gets a new card number while I wait three or four days for a card to show up in the mail. I can tap to pay in the interim and it's so much less of a pain in the ass in the interim.

Then you can just write it down. You don't have to use the imprint, it's just to help reduce error and make it a bit faster.

There's a secondary point to the carbon copy machine. It proves the person possessed and presented the card which is a level of proof against fraud.

Maybe prove in a legal/compliance sense. It's not too complicated to emboss numbers and letters onto a plastic card.

Worked at one. 48 hours of diesel at the location I was at with a supply contract that had stiff penalties for letting the tanks run dry. Besides annual maintenance the contract prints money for the provider in between events. Registers worked without internet but satellite backup to terrestrial internet obviates that problem in most scenarios except a carrington event. Only the gm and another manager could reorder or run a register on paper but that likely would never be needed with their other preventative measures. Is also easy to train someone once you have one person that knows how. Pay and conditions sucked but it is nice to know that the company takes their responsibility to the community seriously.

Have you never walked into a store and they said you can't use a CC because their reader is down? It is nice to have a few dollars in your pocket for times like that.

I have literally called ahead to order food then arrive to pick it up and be told that the card reader has not been working all day. Had no cash so I just ended up leaving.

Why not offer to leave your phone number and pay later when the system is back up. The food goes to waste otherwise…

I live in a low-trust society, so they wouldn't have accepted something like that. Had they offered, I might have said yes and gone back later. But I was mostly just pissed they didn't mention it on the phone.

I dont think I have ever encountered this in my adult life honestly. A more common occasion is encountering a business that is cash only (usually small market stalls) and is infinitely more annoying as I have to go and take out a amount of money greater than the product I want to buy, leaving me with a rather annoying amount of loose change.

I used to own several restaurants. This happens far more often than most people may realize.

It happens 100% of the time I've been in a taxi.

Agreed. Especially when there's no ATM for 5 miles.

Plurality of payment methods is always more desirable and more robust. If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale.

The ability to negotiate and adapt is what makes the world go round.

One example; I was caught in an emergency needing to get a taxi to an airport. On the way I explained the situation to the driver, and ended up negotiating the fare as a mix of US dollars, Danish Kroners, and a good bottle of wine, where the official expected currency was Euros.

The problem comes with cashiers and managers who are not business owners and are terrified to do anything unusual. They are tied to procedural rote and unable to think dynamically. It's all about what they can't do even when evidently agreeable and favourable options are on the table.

> If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale.

For some businesses, the overall cost of accepting some of those methods may be higher than the expected revenue from customers who won't use another method. Buying new payment readers. Having to convert the bitcoin immediately to currency to avoid losing money due to its constant price fluctuations. Higher per-transaction fees for some types of payment. Increased susceptibility to fraud (for cheques in particular).

> The problem comes with cashiers and managers who are not business owners and are terrified to do anything unusual. They are tied to procedural rote and unable to think dynamically.

You would be too if you were barely making ends meet, the expected outcome for "a customer asked me to accept an unusual form of payment" was almost always "it was a con, the 'customer' got the merchandise/service for free", and you'd most likely be fired as a result.

> You would be too if you were barely making ends meet, the expected outcome for "a customer asked me to accept an unusual form of payment" was almost always "it was a con, the 'customer' got the merchandise/service for free", and you'd most likely be fired as a result.

Just the millionth example of why trust is a critical component in society. Its presence allows things to be flexible and efficient. Lack of it makes things suck for everyone.

> why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT […]

Well, all other significant concerns aside, NFTs are not fungible, it is literally in the name. Transactions are made through fungible methods.

Example: a $10 bill is exactly the same as any other $10 other bill or the same as having a $10 in your bank account. Same applies to BTC, any bitcoin is an equivalent of any other BTC.

This fungibility is what gives them the baseline feasibility as a common transaction method. Fungibility is just one of the many requirements for something to be useful as a common transaction vehicle, but it is one of the most fundamental ones, and if it isn’t satisfied, the rest of it doesn’t really matter. Sure, BTC is too volatile to be useful for transaction purposes in a lot of cases, but volatility is further up the chain of concerns, and BTC indeed satisfies the fungibility requirement. Sure, common AAPL shares are fungible as well, there is exactly zero difference between shares of AAPL that you can buy and the ones i can buy, but they aren’t fit as a common transaction method for many other reasons too.

Meanwhile, any given NFT is not an equivalent to any other NFT. They are explicitly intended to be unique and non-fungible/non-replaceable. There is no price for 1 NFT, just like there is no price for 1 painting, each NFT and painting is their own non-fungible entity. So everything else aside, NFTs are explicitly and by their definition are hard-disqualified to be a common transaction medium on the very fundamental level. In contrast, BTC doesn’t have such fundamental problems, but more in terms of practical problems (transaction speeds, transaction costs, high volatility, etc.)

Sorry I'm a complete idiot, that was confusing. Meant "Near Field Xfer/Coms = an archaic way of saying "contactless" from about 10 years ago. I forgot there is also "Non Fungible Tokens" for bored apes and whatnot. :)

You forgot NFTs are a thing? That's a good sign, if people start to forget this nonsense, there is yet hope for humanity.

As a former manager of a liquor store, I didn't want my staff to do anything unusual. That was for me and the owner, per the owner's instructions.

It wasn't that they couldn't think about creative solutions, it's that we generally didn't want them to. There were serious implications for wrong decisions. For example, we couldn't sell a product for less than wholesale. The staff had no idea what the markup was and so couldn't know if a discount was above or below wholesale. If a product was sole for less than wholesale, the owner could have lost his license.

The wildest we got was when the computers crapped out. I told the staff to write down every transaction. Each transaction included the cost of the item, bottle deposit, and tax. On a Friday/Saturday night, we knew the top 10 item totals by heart and we were also good at counting back change.

When I was a regular run of the mill staffer at the store, I was happy to stay in my lane. The expectations were clear and that was good for everyone even if we, or customers, were sometimes inconvenienced.

True. The only time I have walked out of store (maybe once or two times) is when I have already used card few times previously with unplanned $50+ purchases. Now this time I only need $5 thing, & they say there's charge of $0.50 for card.

I also was in your similar example. In US I have a car, so very rarely I use public transport which is not Bart. I landed in Toronto at 2am, got into Bus Google Maps told me, Bus driver said $2.50 fare, cash only. I gave him American 3 dollars, and he gave me Canadian $0.50 change back.

This is common in Florida around hurricanes.

I have never needed to buy things so urgently that this would ever come up.

If a store's CC reader is down, then I'm just plain not transacting their that day. That's fine: there are other stores.

It used to be that many companies that accepted credit cards would have a backup carbon copy imprint machine to capture a rubbing of your card alongside your signature as an offline credit card capture mechanism that was reconciled later. They made a satisfying KA-THUNK sound.

Now that many cards no longer use raised numbers I expect such mechanisms wouldn’t work as well.

In most Norwegian supermarkets the card readers (chip and pin and contactless) still work even if disconnected from the network. In my local one they just print two copies of the receipt and ask you to sign one just in case the reconciliation process fails when the network comes online again. Some small stores have an account with Vipps so if their readers actually are down but the phone network is up then they just ask you to pay with Vipps (https://www.lifeinnorway.net/what-is-vipps/).

Fun anecdote: I walked into a Capital One (BANK) where they have a Café, and the gimmick is that if you pay with your Capital One card, you get a reduced price.

They said their payment terminals were down so they could not take credit cards. I said oh... I don't have any cash, oh well no coffee for me. They said well... we can comp you one drink per person if you don't have cash.

Neither I nor they considered the option of me walking over to the nearby bank ATM and withdrawing cash.

> I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know.

That's your choice, not a problem with cash

> Most of the stores I shop at won't actually be able to sell me anything

But many other stores will

> ... by the end of the day

Often, it is all that is needed

Not all outages are apocalypse scenarios. Sometimes, it is just about finding something to eat for the night, the kind of small things that add up in an emergency situation.

Take the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami for instance, it caused big problems like flooded cities and the Fukushima disaster, but it also caused small problems for millions of people, power outages, stopped trains, etc... These people had to eat, sleep,... while most of the infrastructure was down, it got better the next day, but in the meantime, it is good not to have to worry about millions of people being able to buy their meal when thousands are in need for immediate assistance.

In that case, it might be wise for you to withdraw some cash now (depending on your financial situation). I keep a couple hundred in crisp bills of varying denominations in a go bag.

How long would that last you, though? I’d go through that in a week…

Typically go bags are emergency items meant for immediate "GO"ing during or right before a natural disaster, forced evacuation, civil unrest, or condemnation of your living space. So it would a week to get your feet under you.

How much would 0 dollars last you?

My whole life.

If there is like a hurricane and your whole city is out of power for a week and you can't leave, there will be distributions of water and food pretty quickly.

IMO you need the cash more to make the first day or two easier, or if there is a card payment outage as happened last year here in Canada,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_o...

Moneris just had an outage a week or two ago on Sat.

If a widespread power outage lasts more than a week, you would have bigger issues to deal with and (hopefully) community resources to draw upon. Otherwise, there is a good chance that things would be brought back up piecemeal, and you would be able to get cash or pay via credit/debit at least somewhere.

Hey - where do you live? When are you not present in your place? Just asking out of curiosity.

I second this, although I'm not as well prepared but I like having an extra $80-$100 in cash around the house for "just in case" situations... you never know when you'll need it.

It isn't just for infra failure. When your credit card provider cuts you off for "unusual activity" that they won't go into detail about, and you realise they are free to refuse you business as they feel like - you'll appreciate cash while rushing to find a new provider as existing debts still loom.

I’ve actually run into this more with debit/cash accounts than with credit cards. I’ve had checking accounts frozen, but I’ve never had a credit card entirely suspended for “unusual activity”. At worst they’ve declined individual charges until I called, or I just switched to a different card, since it’s easy to have many redundant credit cards.

For travel, etc. it's absolutely a good idea to have multiple redundant cards (that aren't issued by the same bank). I haven't had issues for years, but I have had issues in the past and it's a lot easier to just pull out a different card than deal with international calls trying to get a problem resolved on the spot.

I have CCs suspended all the time, requiring verification (often steam purchases..). In this case I'm talking about the entire account, and linked CCs, suspended for activity - all incoming payments, card payments and direct debits suspended.

I couldn't use my card a few months ago because of accumulated tarnish. All caused by penny pinchers abandoning gold plated contacts. In a paperliess socciety, the lack of erasers may be our ultimate downfall.

I'm not even sure if it's possible to pay most bills in cash in my country. I have had a bank account frozen due to identity theft; it took me less than 10 minutes to open a new account and get a new debit card in my Google Wallet. The bank transferred my funds within a couple of hours and all of my recurring payments were automatically switched within a couple of days.

Maybe my experiences are atypical, but my impression is that consumer banking in the US is quite dysfunctional.

This is pure privilege to be able to open an account so quickly. Not everyone is so well off.

Again, I don't know what the situation is in the US, but over here it's a privilege available to anyone with a recognised form of ID issued by any EU member state. If you don't have that ID you'll have to go into a branch, but you have the legal right to a bank account, even if you have no home address, even if you've been made bankrupt, even if you don't have the legal right to be in the country.

As someone who lived in Thailand for two years and experienced the joy of scanning a QR code on a postcard to pay a power bill, your experiences are not atypical: the U.S. is behind the curve here.

Your experience could be done here in the US as well. Doing a transfer within the same bank is usually pretty instant. I could get a new account at my bank and a digital card to add to Google Wallet in a similar timeframe.

You are moving the goal posts. Before it was retail transactions and now it is bill pay.

I live in the US. I keep a couple thousand dollars in cash at home for emergencies, and in my part of the US if the power went out there are a number of stores that could continue operating.

And if a tree falls on you and breaks your leg... We can bring up all kinds of scenarios but his point is a good one.

It's probably worth keeping some (few hundred dollars maybe) cash around for a variety of reasons. But pretty much no store is going to be able to (or at least try to) sell you anything if they don't have power--the most likely scenario. Maybe some emergency supplies in a natural disaster but I pretty much guarantee you my local Walmart is closing its doors if there's no power.

And, as others note, CC readers in an individual store do go down though I probably won't have much cash in my pocket even if I have some at home.

In a true shit hit the fans situation cash is you what you need to bribe the official to get you on the boat/plane/train out of the disaster area.

In that case you would often need gold, not cash.

By the time the infrastructure and economy is fucked enough by disaster that currency is worthless, the gold will be worthless as well.

I always tell rich people that ill buy everything they own for this can of beans here. You might not want to buy it now but eventually you will take the deal.

Beans and bullets are better than gold in a SHTF scenario. As are Bic lighters.

I'm partial to clipper lighters, myself. There not as reliable, but they're completely reusable. (gas refill port, removable flint stalk)

What are you going to do, cut up your gold into tiny bits to give to people? Gonna keep a scale with you and weigh it out exactly based on the market rate? It seems pretty useless for spending on supplies and food if you ask me.

You keep the gold in the form of relatively small coins, not large bars.

> It seems pretty useless for spending on supplies and food if you ask me.

Seem pretty useful to me. At least historically, you can generally exchange gold for goods even in a total disaster scenario. You won't be weighing anything out or getting change, of course. You'll be seriously overpaying by the standards of a functioning economy. But nonetheless, you'll be able to engage in enough commerce to help you survive.

That said, I don't keep gold around. I do keep cash -- but if things have devolved to the point where cash isn't useful, then I'll have much larger problems than figuring out how to buy stuff.

> What are you going to do, cut up your gold into tiny bits to give to people?

You could carry some Goldbacks: https://www.goldback.com/

That's a reason to have a bank with traditional branches. Also a reason for land-lines that don't require a separate power source.

I think South Africa has had power problems in recent years, might be good to look at how they've dealt with it?

If our nations air traffic controllers can figure it out I think big business can too.