Coinless society will rob many members of society
The flurry of media messages about a digital age and cashless society has been steadily increasing over the past year or two, parallel to more people tapping and swiping rather than scrabbling for notes and coins at the till.
Loosely, but clearly, linked stories about robot cashiers and “self-service” shopping have got me thinking about where we’re headed, and how this is likely to impact on the most basic day-to-day business of being human.
It bothers me to think people may be replaced by machines, just so that I can have my groceries ticked, processed and packed by a machine.
I also am irked that small businesses must pay a transaction fee for every purchase on those portable card machines.
I’m not a banker, and certainly not financially savvy enough to understand the hidden costs and nuances of banking and finance in general, but it’s concerning to know that my friend Annie, who sells homemade clothes at markets and such, has to pay over R8 or more to the bank each time a customer uses a card instead of cash.
I’m not an entrepreneur — I work online, mostly, and get paid via EFT, have only a few clients, pay tax twice a year, and am easy pickings for authorities wishing to track my income and expenditure. Nothing to hide here, and physical cash never enters into it.
But not everybody works this way; and for the citrus fruit vendor on Main Street, whose week’s wages depend exclusively on the string of R5 coins plopping into her tin, I cannot fathom how a digital age is going to be of any help to her at all.
Another small business friend of mine, Claire, a health practitioner who also sells beautiful products, recently posted a valuable viewpoint by Florence Moss, who said the younger generation doesn’t understand the knock-on effect of relegating cash (or any form of bartering) to the dung heap.
Forcing digital-only trading onto humanity would be bad news, she argues, and we tend to forget how often we use coins not for shopping, but for living: giving to the homeless; saving cash for a rainy day; tipping waitresses or hairdressers who don’t get a slice of the card machine pie; selling unwanted items at a steal; plopping small change into busking musicians’ hats; no secret stash for domestic violence victims and — no privacy, ever, when buying or selling anything.
Moss is right, though I know that counterarguments abound: privacy, anti-fraud, security and convenience arguments that soothe concerns and tell us how lucky we’ll be to transact without being hijacked or pick-pocketed; and imagine a world without beefy uniforms, big guns and armoured trucks at ATMs.
People such as Moss, Claire and Annie aren ’ t stupid.
They know this, but they see beyond the soothsaying and marketing that ’ s elevating digitalisation into the holy grail of 21st-century living.
They’ve reminded me that there’s more to this than meets the eye — and I’ll be damned if my apple-cheeked fruit vendor gets taken down in the march towards modernity.