We are quite a way off before people travel around the world without cash in their pockets. The growth of plastic and electronic transactions have tended to impact traveller's cheques rather than cash.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The truth is, I never travel without cash. I always take a few tens with me in case of an emergency. There's never been an emergency, and in time, I realized that Americans don't want to touch customers' dirty bills. They also don't want to touch your credit card: you have to put it through the machine yourself, with your own fingers.
The rest of the world wants our cash; we like plastic.
Cash as a physical entity will virtually cease to exist, with coins and checkbooks consigned to museums. As people conduct their financial transactions on hand-held devices made secure by advanced biometrics, even tipping will be done electronically.
A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it's extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let's make it's easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.
Small businesses have told us that having cash in their pocket is one of the primary things that they need.
Credit or debit cards, for starters, are nothing short of shoppers' Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money, we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic.
Everyone can get a little sloppy with cash and it's smart to notice. But what's squeezing you is the big stuff you ladle onto your credit cards.
We live in a digital world where all is available at the touch of a screen. Money has been simplified, changed subtly over time from tangible bills to numbers in cyberspace. Cash is no longer in a cloth bag; it's numbers on a screen. Numbers that can be manipulated and modified. If you run out of numbers, you can just buy some more, right?
I think we are in an age where cash pays for time and space. The more cash you have, the bigger space you can buy and the smaller the technology to put in it.
Folks can't carry around money in their pocket. They've got to go to an ATM machine, and they've got to pay a few dollars to get their own dollars out of the machine. Who ever thought you'd pay cash to get cash? That's where we've gotten to.