Chinese Way of Doing Business: In Cash We Trust
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Coming from a country where I visit an ATM maybe half a dozen times a year and a bank branch even less it was quite a shock. Fortunately I can still count change pretty quickly.
The other interesting thing about Chinese currency is how light the coins are. They feel like they're made of plastic.
This is only the really old designs (1950s), also really small coins. 0.01 and 0.05 RMB coins are cheap and flimsy aluminum or something (? dunno exactly what metal). You almost never see those any more.
The newer 0.1, 0.5, and 1.0 coins are equivalent to US coins in sturdiness, some kind of brass or nickel or something.
Fen probably wasn't eliminated due to inflation fears. For the same reason, they won't issue a bill larger than 100RMB even though it would be very useful.
They smell terrible.
Is this usual for paper money? My home country went polymer over 20 years ago so I can't actually remember. Do used american bills smell like the sweaty palms of the thousand people who used them before you?
However, the US seems very aggressive about replacing worn bills. This may be related to the fact that so much of our currency goes in and out of automated machinery these days, and people don't hang on to cash very long.
Anecdotally, bills today seem much tidier than they did when I was a kid. Of the dozen bills in my pocket right now, none is older than 2006, and none are crumpled.
Now that my rent has gone up and they want me to pay once every 6 months, we just go to the bank and do a huge transfer directly to my landlord's account.
I'm still shocked my companies here in the U.S. that don't offer non-check payments. Most government agencies require cash or check (I never carry either).
I recently switched to Simple bank, which doesn't offer checks, and I've definitely hit a few snags along the way because of it.
Don't generalize. Checks in Tunisia are used from small transactions ($20) to very big ones (certified checks).
Checks were never used very much in most of east Asia. They have some use in India given its UK heritage.
Rewards points are a sign of inefficiency.
Huh? The retailer is paid the same amount (sans the transaction fee) either way. The cashback incentive is to get people in debt.
I've found that I spend 5-8% less on average on food, meals, etc. I'm not a spendthrift by any means, I budget and pay my bills just fine and don't have money problems.
I had a wallet stolen while travelling and lost access to my cards (except AMEX, who had it FedEx'd to my hotel by 8AM the next morning) for about a week. So I ended up using cash for about a week and I was shocked that it actually had a measurable impact.
Try it for a week -- you'll be surprised.
Besides, I don't think enforcing tax collection is, or has ever been, a function of the police force.
China's internal revenue service tolerates widespread sales tax evasion via undocumented cash transactions, even if for no other reason than that they lack the auditing infrastructure necessary to enforce collection.
Meanwhile, in the cases when someone does ask for a receipt for a cash transaction, it is always because they want to "expense" it. Salary rates in China, at both state-owned and private enterprises, are shockingly low, but they compensate for it by allowing their employees to claim expense reimbursement for practically anything. Therefore, there is even a black market for receipts. If you spend cash on an expensive meal in China and you get a receipt, you can even sell that receipt to a receipt trader, who will resell it to someone else for 1% of the amount on the receipt, and then that person will claim it to their company as an expense, and get reimbursed cash for it. This sort of fraud is rampant in China.