I don’t use actual cash for that much, except buying things from individuals as opposed to businesses – but I do such buying regularly, being rural. I carry $80 to $100 bucks spending money in my wallet and go through that pretty slowly. I carry my wallet in a small shoulder bag which also contains my car keys, phone, checkbook, and a pen. Nothing else in there. I can tell if I am missing one of those objects just by the change in weight when I pick it up. In fact I don’t ever put anything in my pockets. I change pants all the time because my home pants are always too dirty to go anywhere in.
I make a point of writing checks for small local businesses as credit cards charge them a fee they must absorb. I also write checks for services which are one person operations, such as my cleaning lady, my horse shoer, my Pilates teacher.
I used to do that when I was in college - a habit I picked up from my dad, who developed the habit back in the day when CC transactions involved a lot of handwriting and manual data entry on the part of the salesperson. These days, CC transactions are almost entirely automated, all the way from scanning the bar code to transmitting the transaction total to the bank. So I’ve mostly given up on that habit: I look at the receipt before leaving the store, and if the grand total is in line with my expectations at that point, then I don’t hang onto the receipt unless I think I might need to later return an expensive item.
You don’t have to - for whatever reason, you choose to save all the card receipts for bookkeeping purposes but not the cash ones. I look at the charge in the store/on the parking app etc. and that’s pretty much it. I don’t keep every single credit/debit card receipt and compare them to the statement at the end of the month just like I don’t keep every cash receipt and compare them to how much cash I started the day with vs how much I ended the day with and go crazy looking for the missing 32 cents ( which is actually something my husband used to do every night. )
They also make out like bandits on the people who do NOT pay it off every month.
The 5% is only the rebate on stuff bought from Amazon. I think the rebate on other purchases is 1% (may be higher for targeted types, e.g. gasoline).
We do carry some cash, and use it for smaller purchases; it can also be handy when travelling. A couple years back, we were on a longish (2+ weeks) trip, and I used those little pill envelopes for my daily meds. I told my husband “I feel like a drug dealer. Little baggies of pharmaceuticals, and a lot of cash!”.
But it’s just more convenient to not have to worry about having enough cash on hand, for most purchases.
This can of course lead to overspending. If you have x dollars in cash, and that’s your limit, you will spend less. If you can just swipe a piece of plastic, well…
There are some businesses that don’t take credit cards. A restaurant we ate at in Chicago did not (I’ve since heard they have started taking cards, but have not been back since then). Another that we frequently visit in New York.
Other than travelling, though, we rarely have more than 40-50 bucks in cash on hand - not counting the emergency-cash stash we have in a dresser drawer. That’s usually 100-200 bucks, depending on whether we have needed to raid it for some purpose and whether we’ve restocked it yet.
We loved going to a tiny Italian Restaurant run by an older Italian woman. She had a horribly foul mouth, but if she liked you everything was cool. There was a sign that said CASH ONLY. Every so often a new customer would go to the register and hand her a credit card. I loved those nights!! She would ask them, “WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM, CAN’T YOU FUCKING READ??”
It would really shake the person up, having just finished a lovely meal and the sweet little Italian granny starts throwing F Bombs their way. She’d also go crazy if someone asked for a different salad dressing. The tables had cruets of vinegar/oil/seasonings. She did not understand why anyone would need more than that. Another “WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM?” scenario.
Seriously, it was like dinner theater. Her red sauce was divine. Sadly, she retired and died.
I generally stick to using plastic, but I really do like to have some kind of paper money in my wallet, even if it’s one paltry single. It just feels strange to have absolutely nothing holding down the fort.
She was a wonderful person if she liked you. On any given night her tables were filled with us “regulars”, enjoying her cooking (it was delicious and her prices reasonable).
For first time diners who set her off, yeah, she’d tear you a new asshole. But I always looked at it like dinner theater. I miss her.
I think I get it. I have a friend who says outrageous things just to get a rise out of people. I was offended at first but that accomplished little. Now I see he mostly trolls for good. I’m just interested in what he’s going to say next. And he helped me grow a thicker skin, for which I’m also grateful. I think I would be amused by this server.
And the Crowdstrike failure proves, yet again, better have some cash on you for when all the cash registers at the convenience store simultaneously go down.
Won’t help much when the cashiers won’t know what to do without being able to scan your purchases, much less without being able to take your cash and give change.
I pay for a few things in cash. Really cheap stuff that I don’t want a store I like to take a hit on CC fees. (OTOH, I hear that processing the cash can also be a hit sometimes.)
But the most recent uses is to have a quarter to play the “What’s that behind your ear?” game with the (world’s cutest) grandkid.
That depends on who’s down. I’m sure every combination & permutation happened on Friday but there were definitely cases where the retail store wasn’t affected by the outage but their vendor who processed card payments for them was. The store was functioning normally & could scan & take payments as usual including cash (& even potentially checks though) but not cards. Banking was one of the industries hit hard by Friday’s outage; I didn’t hear so much about retail being down so retail would have worked fine until the hand off to their processor/vendor.
-* The last time I carried a checkbook with me was last year specifically because we were invited to an out-of-state Bar Mitzvah & I had my SO (who doesn’t live with me) make out the check as she has better handwriting, I can’t remember the time before that that I had it on me.
I think that somewhat depended on the type of store. I know that there were supermarkets that couldn’t open because it’s impossible for anyone to know all the prices and they aren’t individually marked , and that would be an issue even for cash payments. That doesn’t mean that stores with few items or ones that are individually priced can’t take cash payments.
It’s not the type of store, it’s whether they use Crowdstrike & whether their systems were directly impacted or just those of their affiliated vendors. There are enough products in a typical convenience store that I wouldn’t expect the clerk to remember all but a handful of the most common ones. I’m sure there are some supermarket chains that use Crowdstrike & were down/closed for some part of Friday while others could ring you up as normal just not take cards & others that probably weren’t affected at all.
