So a couple I’m friends with who used to live in NYC but moved down South were just on vacation at a resort that is cashless.
This did not sit well with the wife.
Apparently, it is not simply a matter of inconvenience that a resort hotel does not allow you to pay your bill will a large Scrooge McDuck sack-o-cash. This represents an attack on our very liberties where the banks and the government will use the power of digital payments to track and control your every spend and where her daughter will lose her precious freedom to pay for stuff from her piggy bank full of $20 bills given to her by her grandparents.
This doesn’t seem like chemtrails and lizard people to me. Being extremely dubious about being forced to pay for everything in a way that leaves a permanent record of who brought what from whom, that the government and big corporations can use at will, seems entirely sensible. I’d have said that 10 years ago but right now with the countless things that have gone from being hypotheticals from a dystopian future to routine everyday life in America, there is nothing conspiratorial about it.
It’s a bad idea. The fact it’s happening doesn’t make any less of a bad idea.
It’s also common that resorts are cashless. I wonder what rock the OP’s friends have been living under that this is news to them?
Which is a separate issue than whether it’s outrageous to them.
My general experience is that people object loudly to a cashless society for one of two reasons.
They’re paranoid cranks, perhaps amplified by internet nuttiness.
They’re in a business that generates lots of cash and they love the idea of understating and underpaying their income taxes by 50-90%. They really don’t want to give up their secret advantage.
What do you mean by “control”? Yes, information about your spending becomes a matter of record, but who cares? And it’s not publicly available unless there’s a data breach, but even then, who cares?
As Bill Maher put it in a different context, about anti-vaxers claiming that the COVID vaccine contains a tracking chip, “look, folks, nobody is interested in tracking your fat ass when you go down to the Piggly Wiggly!”
Yes, I think in general privacy concerns should be taken seriously, but there’s a point at which it just becomes mindless paranoia. Pretty much 100% of all the things I buy are on credit cards, so a determined entity could get access to records showing what stuff I’m interested in buying. But again, so what?
There is a fringe Christian take on it that says credit cards and barcodes and such are the mark of the beast and are part of some evil conspiracy by the Devil to entrap the souls of sheeple. At least that’s as much as I can or want to understand such nuttery. There could be some component of that here, but I doubt it.
On the other hand, sticking with cash is a way of saying “the government has no business knowing where or what I spend my money on,” and I tend to agree with that. It’s a little different when you’re a business taking in payments, but I do think cash should be accepted everywhere even if credit/debit aren’t, within reason (like no jars of pennies, etc).
But what, exactly, does it add up to? A “profile”? How about this profile: “a furtive individual who uses no traceable means of payment, and is in the habit of regularly withdrawing large amounts of cash”? If I was involved in law enforcement, I’d investigate the shit out of that guy!
The thing that is an actual problem with cashless society is that different people will pay a different price for the same item, and it can be within minutes of the purchase. This is what they call surge pricing, and is starting to happen more and more. It is not just when you purchase, say, a plane ticket, but when based on what they know about you and how much you usually spend, they will charge not what the market can bear, but what you can bear. Being skeptical of a cashless traceable society is actually something to be concerned about.
I am not saying that paying without cash is inherently bad, it is the way that data is shared, and with whom, and what the people who receive that data do with it.
My objection is that “no cash accepted” and “there is a 4% fee to the purchaser for using electronic payment” are likely going to end up converging.
My take? If we are going to be a cashless society, then we should have a government-run electronic payment infrastructure (yes, funded by taxes). Allowing private, for-profit interests to charge me for the privilege of paying for my groceries (or, charging the grocery store for the privilege of accepting digital payment) is a wealth siphon of epic proportions.
As far as privacy goes… that ship has sailed for 99.99% of the population. Yes, one can hide specific purchases from the data collectors by using cash, but for the most part, for most of our purchases, it’s too late.
I genuinely don’t get this attitude. Have you actually seen the news recently? In 2026 the idea there can be no negative repercussions from the government knowing all the details about every single financial transaction, is laughably naive IMO
I mean right now it seems reckless and asking for trouble to buy abortion pill on credit card, and f_ck knows it must feel like putting their life on the line every time an undocumented person uses their debit card
The “cashless society” is just part of the plan to confine us to 15-minute cities under chemtrail-induced mind control, with mRNA-laced food and microchip-containing vaccines. Baa-baa-baa, you sheeple herds!