Cash
July 24, 2024
Recently, I’ve been doing something extremely unfashionable. I’ve been paying for everyday purchases in cash.
That goes against the grain in 2024. Maybe it’s going to get some of you to write me off as a nostalgic, impractical, idealistic Luddite. So it goes.
But maybe, using cash is an interesting thing to do precisely because of where the world is right now. Big tech companies increasingly run our lives—look at the dependence on Microsoft Windows that was revealed all around us in the CrowdStrike disaster. Corporations watch everything we do, saving it in databases they sell to one another as business intelligence. And now a venture capitalist, whose weird extremist ideology is very much a product of Silicon Valley, could be VP.
In these times, it seems kind of cool that with one weird trick, I can leave my bank, Square, Apple, and Google1 utterly in the dark about where I spend my money. They have no idea what I’m doing, and I love that. Add to that the perennial argument that it keeps money in the community, builds local economic resilience, and helps fight the ballooning of prices to cover card fees.2
The easiest places to use cash are the indie local businesses, often cafés and bakeries, that actually want me to use cash, and make it easy by pricing things at round numbers including tax—or at least round in my favor, giving a dollar change instead of $0.97. That’s where I started. More recently, I found a use for the butt pockets in my jeans. In the morning, I put 99 cents in them—a dime, two nickels and four pennies in the left; three quarters in the right—so I can quickly make exact change for the first purchase of the day. That way the change pile on my bedside table doesn’t grow without bound. Sounds silly maybe, but it’s a habit that takes no longer than flossing my teeth.
Of course, this is just working around the fact that inflation has made coins smaller than a quarter more trouble than they’re worth, yet the United States refuses to retire even the penny thanks to the zinc lobby. It wouldn’t surprise me if companies engaged in surveillance capitalism, like Apple, Google, and Square, also lobbied against future proposals to change the status quo of cash being annoying to use.
At least here in San Francisco we have a local ordinance that requires brick-and-mortar business to accept cash, so we’ve ducked the trend of “cashless” businesses.3 The motivation for this ordinance was that card-only businesses exclude unbanked people—sometimes, that’s the intention—accelerating the trend toward two-tier cities. Even so, it’s increasingly common that shops seem surprised or reluctant to accommodate cash. A new coffee shop on Valencia Street invites you when you come in to make your whole order on a touchscreen, no human contact involved. After my friend and I stared at this setup a moment, the barista came over and explained in a tired voice that he could also, if we preferred, take our order off to the side, around the corner.
And maybe that’s why I’ve written this nostalgic, impractical, idealistic, Luddite post: the option to make everyday purchases without being tracked, may not exist forever. If cash continues to decline in popularity, so will the reluctance to accept it increase; other cities will not pass ordinances to protect cash purchases, and there will be increasing pressure to repeal, or not enforce, San Francisco’s. So if you’re still reading, I invite you to join me. Pay cash, spread the word, ruin a surveillance capitalist’s day.
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Who, of course, hoover up for ad targeting all email receipts sent to Gmail addresses. ↩
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It’s a constant fee plus a percent, so I wonder how much it’s also discouraging businesses from offering low-priced items. On cards, a single $5 sale is much better for businesses than five $1 sales. ↩
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Although a certain music venue is currently flagrantly defying the law. ↩
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