Time to get rid of the banknotes and coins

One thing that the current coronavirus pandemic has highlighted is the importance of hygiene and not touching hard surfaces that might harbour recent traces of the virus. That makes handling coins very risky. And plastic banknotes just as much. No wonder we are being urged in foodstores to pay contactlessly.

When I was in Boots yesterday, buying that USB flash drive, I paid by phone using Google Pay. The girl serving me was clearly pleased that I did. She told me she always paid contactlessly nowadays, and shuddered at the thought of going back to cash, and the thought of all those germs - if nothing worse - any cash must be crawling with. I completely agreed. She was impressed when I mentioned that (in a quest to be modern and up-to-date) I had been paying by phone for two years now, and did so whenever I possibly could. I too hated the notion of 'dirty cash' and having to touch notes and coins that hundreds of people must have fingered, some of them with very bad toilet habits. Ugh.

Well, where should this take us? After the virus has gone, shouldn't we all continue cashlessly?

It's become easier and easier to do. Two years ago it was already becoming commonplace to tap a payment machine with a credit card. Paying by phone was however something of a novelty, occasioning many a remark. No longer. Both ways of paying contactlessly are now routine. And away from shop tills, it has become usual to have a cashless option - in many car parks, for instance, and I understand it's the norm on buses, if there isn't some Oyster-style card scheme in general use. An Oyster card is, after all, just a travel card that you fill up with money online and keep using contactlessly until the balance gets low, when you just top it up again. It streamlines the procedure for paying, and lets travelling crowds move faster, saving time for all. You don't need a physical ticket at all. Another forest saved, then.

I think that anyone like myself, who is averse to handling cash for cogent health reasons, should be given more and more opportunities to pay by phone only. I will make it a personal policy to carry around only a small emergency supply of cash - let's say £40 in brand-new banknotes, and £5 in brand-new one-pound coins. Older notes and older coins will be spent, or given to charity. My 'emergency cash' will fit into one very small purse, tucked away. I don't expect to open that purse unless I really have to. Effectively I will be 99% cashless.

The Completely Cashless Society hasn't been a very popular idea up to now, but I think attitudes are changing. I would like an urgent rethink about letting people continue with notes and coins, when it's obviously a public health issue.

The objection is always made that there are 'vulnerable people' who wouldn't be able to cope without cash.

Such as who, I wonder. I don't think that (for instance) old folk find handling cash all that easy. Coins have become small and hard to distinguish from each other - and, because they are small, hard for arthriticky hands to pick up. Then a lot of mental arithmetic has to be done, counting out the right change when paying at the till: that must be difficult for any old person whose concentration is not what it was.

It seems to be a quirk of older people that they prefer cash, and like to 'help' the shop by tendering the exact money, even if it takes five minutes to find the last penny in their purse. It's no help at all, and the shop would actually prefer it if they simply handed over a couple of banknotes, giving them some change in return.

Just like retail outlets generally have stopped accepting cheques, I am sure that soon they will stop accepting cash - or confine people wanting to pay by cash to one till only, all the rest being cashless. From their point of view, the less physical banking to be done, the better.

Here's a solution for those 'vulnerable people' who 'have' to use cash. They buy (or get given) a very simple low-cost device with a touchscreen that can also be operated by voice. It displays a number keyboard and a 'ready to pay' button. They key in (or voice in) the value of the goods purchased. This is displayed, and the device can also 'say' what the figure is. Then they present their device to the payment machine, and the transaction goes through. The amount paid either comes off the limited balance inside the device (on the Oyster card principle) or the payer's bank or credit card balance (if a link to that has been set up).

Even homeless street-sleepers could have a payment device like this. And could receive payments using it, from officials and passers-by with similar machines. A two-way device then.  We could all have one - or else an app on our phones that does the same thing, remotely as well as up close.

Brave New World.