In the 20th century, your bank issued checks drawn on your checking account, which you would write out to pay your bills and send to creditors through the Post Office. I know, they still do that today, but, back then, the checks had a pre-printed “19__” in the date field, so that you only had to add two digits to specify the year. Since 1/1/2000, I have yet to see blank checks with a pre-printed “20__” in the date field. Has anyone else? I’m not complaining about the extra work of writing “20” on every check, but I wonder why, after 20 years, they haven’t started pre-printing the century for our convenience.
I think the practice died out before 2000. It was not much of a convenience. My checks from the 1980s and 1990s didn’t have a pre-printed “19.” I’ve seen it from the early 1900s, and perhaps some banks kept doing it longer than others.
I’ve never had personal checks with a pre-printed “19”, and I have had numerous checking accounts since 1977.
Yes, I’ve only ever had checks with a blank line that said “date” and that does predate 2000.
I typically ended up writing 199x right over it anyways in my haste to fill out the check.
Then there’s the other big convenience, the end of the line where you spell out the amount nearly always has “dollars” written there. I’m willing to bet most people write that anyways. Now your check says “Two hundred fifteen dollars and 17/100----------------dollars”.
I’m not sure who thought preprinting a “19” and the word “dollars” was going to save any real time.
My checks all had the 19__ on them and I, too, was wondering when the checkbooks were going to get on the ball and print the 20___.
My checks have 20__. I don’t write a lot of checks so these at least a couple of years old.
I have checks that I bought maybe twelve years ago and they have the 20__. I am down to my last one so I bought new ones last month. They don’t have it.
I think it’s all due to residual fallout from the Y2K debacle that almost was. People are still so traumatized by that, they have resolved to NEVER AGAIN presume what the first two digits of the year will be.
And maybe a good thing too! So few paper checks are being written these days, maybe a current order of blank checks will last until 2100 !
All of my 21st-century checks have 20__.
I have four checkbooks at hand. Two of them just have a blank “DATE” field. The other two have a “20__” field.
I also have a stack of client checks here. Let me do a quick poll of those checks. Huh. Interesting. The last fifteen handwritten checks I received, each from different clients – every single one of them just has a plaln “date” field without a pre-printed “20”.
To be honest, I don’t see the point of preprinting the first two digits of the year.
Haven’t your banks started chivvying you all on to paperless payments yet? Cheques aren’t quite dead yet in the UK, but definitely on the way out.
We’re moving that way but, yes, checks are still popular. It’s only in the last year or two that the majority of my non-corporate/individual clients have started to pay me electronically. (And it’s only a slim majority.) And as far as corporate clients go, pretty much every single one of them still pays me by check. It is annoying, because I would rather be paid electronically both for the convenience/expediency and the ease of tracking/accounting.
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This. I don’t know of anyone who has written a cheque in Canada in like 15 years.
Our electronic banking system allows you to just pay at the Point Of Service with your bank card.
ETA: Kinda ninjad by Pulykamell.
Things have been slowly changing, but one of the changes is that checks often are paperless, from the bank’s point of view. If I get a check, I can deposit it from the convenience of my home, and the bank never touches it. There’s still inefficiency in that I have to receive a physical piece of paper, but that’s my inconvenience, not theirs.
When all of my creditors start taking electronic payment, then I can stop writing checks. I don’t write them out of any desire to do so. Some businesses aren’t set up to receive payments any other way.
Actually, I’m not even sure if anyone accepts cheques here in Canada anymore; why would they?
You’d be surprised. Corporately, we are about 75% electronic for receivables and about 98% for payables.
Personally, i pay our gardener by cheque quarterly. He is older and low tech, does not even text or have email or I would pay him that way.
On a related note, I saw a post on Facebook the other day warning people not to write the year as just “20”, as it could easily be changed to another year, e.g. 6 Jan 20 could be turned into 6 Jan 2019 or 6 Jan 2021. Worth bearing in mind.
(Of course last year people could have changed it all to anything from 1900 to 1999, but a one-year change is more likely to be useful, I imagine.)
Same here. IIRC, which is no sure thing, my blank check vendor offers styles both with and without that purported convenience.
Here are two reasons I still use checks: 1) A physical record of payment can prove to be very important, legally–I pay my rent with a check both because my landlord can’t deal with EFT and because in the event of a dispute, a cancelled check is pretty rock-solid proof of payment that relies upon no third-party’s record-keeping; and 2) I like the USPS, and I’m perfectly happy to throw them a coupla bucks’ worth of business every month to try to help keep them around.
And here are two reasons I might stop using checks (except for the rent): 1) Over the past few years, reports of thieves stealing outbound mail from USPS boxes have become increasingly frequent and worrisome; and 2) If/When the GOP succeeds in their drive to privatize the USPS, they’ll get no more voluntary business from me.