As a Canadian, I also feel like there are so many more pressing issues right now, like housing, employment, inflation, immigration. Does this cash/cashless issue somehow affect one of these things?
While cards have fees, cash has overhead too: you need to go to the bank for deposits, make sure you have enough change, worry about people walking in robbing your till (thus traumatizing staff), keeping a balance (to reduce 'shrinkage' from employees).
Yes, it is "easy" to mandate it, but that is adding a 'regulatory burden' to business owners.
Asking all those one-person shops and merchants to start carrying around a float and writing out paper receipts (or having some kind of battery-powered till+printer) is a pretty big burden.
I agree that mandating businesses to support cash is unnecessary regulatory burden. After all, shouldn’t it be the shopkeeper’s right to do business how they please?
I could log in to my bank online and check, I could keep a mental tally of "I spent this here and that much there, I should have this much...", but both of those are decidely more work.
Furthermore, every time I switch back to cash (and my fiancee has independantly noticed), budgeting and saving gets easier. Once again, likely because of the visual and tactile nature of cash
Most damning of all, guess how well credit and debit worked during the multi-day Rogers outage a few years ago. You say "That was a once in a lifetime fuck-up", I'll say "That's not the only reason or time stores haven't been able to process cards"
I'm under 30, and I remember grocery stores around holiday time being unable to accept anything but cash.
Electronic systems aren't actually a solution here. We have a solution, it's called cash; it does not rely on what is essentially a duopoly (Visa/MC), it does not rely on asking permission from a handful of gatekeepers (for-profit banks you'd like to transfer to/from)
Credit unions aren't the solution to the latter either - you can use one, but anyone you're trying to pay is almost certainly with a bank.
You are also eliding all the positive features of electronic payments, like being theft-proof, being much quicker to pay with, and being trackable for my own benefit.
> for-profit banks
The banks run their retail banking businesses as a loss leader for their savings accounts (the "deposit franchise"). If all the banks were mutualised transaction costs would probably go up, not down. Also, doesn't exactly the same argument apply to cash? Where do you think businesses get their cash floats from? They get them from banks.
There's certainly an argument to be made that the privacy benefits or the inclusionary benefits are worth the hit to people's economic freedom, but don't pretend there isn't a tradeoff here
Lots of folks are unbanked and cannot get credit (cards):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked
It would given them more freedom to participate in the economy.
Basically make the effort to move forward, not make the pledge to stay behind forever.
It's not just about forcing banks, but also about the people trusting banks and institutions, which have historically not been kind to (say) black people. Lots of folks could perhaps (e.g.) not be able to keep minimum balances that would avoid monthly service fees, then you get dinged for NSF, but of course you can pay for overdraft coverage.
It's why some suggest (government) post office accounts are a useful tool for dealing with this: profit is not a motive, so all of these hoops can hopefully be avoided.
In this day and age I think that ship has sailed, in that it's hell to try to live without a smart phone and online payment. Missing a payment because they needed to go pay cash on friday evening and couldn't make it, phoning around to find on duty doctor on a saturday night etc. are things that will become more and more of a hurdle as vulnerable people make the move to the more beneficial online equivalents.
Too many critical things are already impractical to deal with the old ways.
Some EU countries force banks to provide minimum service to anyone with a valid identity. The good part is these accounts have no checking service nor overdraft possibility (any action is done in real time towards the actual account balance, there's no payment coming it two days after the fact with no money to clear it, and anything that bounced is just unpaid, with no additional punishment on the bank side). The bad part is the service provided is really minimal and online banking will often not be included, and at best will be an extra fee depending on the bank.
Maybe one idea is to come up with many alternative payment methods. In Africa I've read everyone pays with a phone number.
In USA government gives food bank cards loaded with money. Maybe a system where anyone can load cash onto a card easily through any ATM machine.