Tony Giuliani
Business Finance 350
September 25, 2013
The other day I needed to fill up my car with gas, but when I got to the gas station by my house the pumps had a sign on them saying “Cash Only” due to an internet outage. This did not bother me as I had cash on hand but as I pumped my gas several vehicles pulled up, saw the signs, and left for another station. I even heard one person muttering about how inconvenient it was for them that the store could only take cash as they got back into their car. Now normally I pay for gas at the pump with a credit card even though I usually have cash on me, mainly because I do not have to deal with pre-paying and guessing how much gas I need, and I prefer to pump my gas and go about my day with a minimum of human interaction.
This is a phenomena getting more and more common throughout a world where currency and coinage are quickly becoming items that people no longer carry as their primary instrument of payment and businesses would rather not accept. We all want a quantifiable measurement for what our wealth is but don’t really care if it is in actually hard currency or just expressed in the zeros and ones in the digital world. Call the money a Dollar, Euro, Pound, Deutschmark or any other name you want as long as we know, on paper, we have an amount of them is all we care about.
Why have currency and checks become less and less important as a form of payment when they were once responsible for 100 percent of all payments? The answer is the rise of the credit/debit card and the advancement of technology. Some countries are more ahead in adoption of cashless options. Examples are Sweden, where physical currency makes up just 3 percent of the nation’s total supply (Newman) and our neighbor to the north, Canada, which is experimenting with ways to get rid of currency
