A couple nights ago I was watching the TV and happened upon Doc Hollywood, a cute but mostly forgettable Michael J. Fox film from the early 90s. In it, through circumstances unimportant to my question, Fox’s character gets stuck in the small fictional town of Grady, South Carolina with no cash, only credit cards and checks, which of course nobody in town is able to process (and implies there is also no bank in town), which leads to my question:
Are there any remaining towns in the US so small and isolated that their local economies still operate strictly on cash? Assuming that the movie took place in the “at the time it was made present” (which was 1991), did such towns still exist even then?
People of this town will take your check, but not your credit card. Not sure if they take out of state checks; would be surprised if they did because most places will not.
As recently as the late 90’s, it wasn’t all that uncommon to find rural gas stations that wouldn’t take credit cards. It might be generous to call them towns, but there are still plenty of small settlements where the combination gas station/general store/bar is the only commercial presence in town and if they’re cash-only the town is cash-only by default. When gas prices went up in the 2000’s, though, most of those little places did have to start taking cards simply because nobody really carried enough cash around to buy a whole tank of gas. Of course a lot of them just went out of business or quit selling gas.
The Oregon town where I live (population about 150) is like that. Of course, there are only a handful of retail businesses there…an auto repair shop, a cafe/bar, grocery store, barber shop, lumber & hardware place, that’s about it. It isn’t a city ordnance or anything, but by common agreement the business owners have decided not to take plastic. They will, however, take anyone’s check (including those from a small but steady tourist traffic) and most will give anyone a charge account for the asking. Occasionally a person from somewhere else will have a meal at the cafe then turn out to have nothing but plastic in their wallet. The owner just takes their name & address and says “send me the money later”. Surprisingly, they hardly ever get stiffed.
SS
For some reason New Orleans has a huge number of places that don’t take credit cards - so much so that all the horrible ticky-tacky souvenir shops advertise their ATMs on the signage. And in fact I had to leave my fiance as collateral at Cafe du Monde and try three different horrible little souvenir shop ATMs before I found one that wasn’t out of money.
In Redwood City, there are a lot of Latino-owned businesses that are cash-only. In my experience, for various reasons, Latinos (Mexican-Americans in particular) do everything in cash, and its not unusual for them to pay for home improvements/cars/misc large purchases in thousands of dollars of cash.
The guys who landscaped our back yard didn’t take checks. We had to pay $1200 in cash :eek:
