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Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

People switched away from cash during COVID. Lots of people who might have been unbanked or lightly banked went all-in as everything went digital.

Now restaurants (historically a pretty cash-heavy industry) have fewer cash transactions.

Possibly related?

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Oh now that is an interesting observation. A long standing dirty secret.

Very maybe!

Absolutely and unequivocally, the mismeasure of man. How exactly do you measure productivity in a restaurant? Profit?

If a chicken and a half, layed an egg and a half in a day and a half, how much productivity is gained by the chicken with a cell phone? A smidgen?

The premise is of course completely preposterous.

I think the move away from cash coincided with COVID but was not related much.

The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly).

> The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly).

Useless? Wait until your digital transactions fail or your bank or your state decides to block your access to your payment system. And believe me, it's not a "if", this is a real threat that will be waged against people. When it's technically possible, it always ends up becoming a reality. And by that time, "going back to cash" may not be an option in certain places, because of 'convenience'.

That's arguably already the reality in the US to some extent. Many people I know don't even carry enough cash to pay for a single meal, unless they know they'll be going to a cash only place.

Is that more or less likely than the state deciding to block your access to freedom, and arresting and imprisoning/deporting you?

When you live in an authoritarian state with arbitrary law 'enforcement', the problem isn't the payment system that you're using. It's that you no longer live in a country of laws.

And that's not a problem that's going to be solved by using dead tree money.

More likely, by a huge margin, since it takes only checking a box in some software system, whereas the alternatives you mention need a lot of messy work to achieve.

States that aren't governed by rule of law have no issue with doing 'messy work'. All the pieces of the security apparatus are already there, and they are full of people who will obey.

I don't see the relevance in your comment. I'm saying it's useless in the sense that I haven't paid for nearly a single thing in cash in a year or two, and this is because of convenience and not because of COVID.

I haven't paid for nearly a single thing with cards in a year or two, and this is because of principle.

And you may get hit by an airplane falling from the sky. Yet people don't stay home because of that. It's a risk assessment. The risk of getting ban from digital payment is not zero, but low enough that the convenience wins out. I haven't carried cash for at least a year, and almost don't carry physical cards nowadays, only my phone. Can I be locked out? for sure. Do I care? Not yet. You are different, of course. I don't tell you what you should do.

You missed the point.

The point is that a lot of restaurants used to not report a lot of cash transactions.

If almost everybody is using digital, the restaurant no longer has the option to underreport as there is an indelible transaction record (generally with an outsourced third party handling your credit cards).

So, some amount of the "productivity increase" is simply the underreported cash transactions now coming onto the books.

Taxi drivers suffered the same thing with the rise of Uber etc. Every fare is now logged in detail.

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