America is a funny place. You can get 127 varieties of salad dressing at your local supermarket, but you can't pay for it except with cash, unless you want to be hit with credit charges, and when you do the prices are not as marked. Australia, in sharp contrast, has laws requiring that the price on the shelf matches the price at the register -- some of them even allow you to get incorrectly-priced items for free, although technically this is a voluntary agreement among shops, not a law. Also, Australia has EFTPOS nearly everywhere; in fact, people are justly suspicious of retail businesses that don't provide EFTPOS, because that's one of the first signs that the business is probably going to go under. And if you want to transfer money, the same system that makes EFTPOS ubiquitous makes direct deposit from one bank account to another a very simple thing. The result is that cheques ("checks" in US English) are very rare indeed, and people really only use credit cards for online purchases or when they're already living beyond their means. (Which means the use of a credit card in day-to-day spending is another warning sign!)

Granted, it's hard to get all 127 varieties of salad dressing here, so there is that.