So Much for "Cash is King"

There's also this thing with store robberies where the criminal will spend a hundred earlier and when they come back to stick up the place they know they didn't get the big bills because they didn't get their $100 back.

If a store takes a $100 and it's fake they get stuck with the entire loss if they take a $10 or less and it's fake there's a good chance it gets passed to someone else and it becomes someone else's problem, and if it's a $20 the loss isn't that bad.

Then there's the "too many hundreds" at one time situation and you get run out of smaller bills.

I can understand businesses that get frequently targeted for robberies gas stations, fast food, to see a benefit to going cashless whenever possible. It makes them less of a target.

30 years ago a $100 bill was a problem for some places. It still is that hasn't changed. But newer payment methods have come up since then. When I was a kid ATMS weren't a thing yet, payphones were everywhere and telephones had a "dial" on them you spend to enter each number. Tvs were big like a piece of furniture and black and white seen at friends houses usually until I was a bit older when color became common.

We didn't have computers. Electric typewriters were the innovation at the time.

Times change, things change.

 

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Admittedly I seldom have $100 bills in my wallet, but I can't recall a single time when a merchant refused my cash payment. Not saying it hasn't happened to others, just not to me.

 

Maybe 5 years ago, my wife and I went on a day road trip and along the way we drove by an antique shop in an extremely small town. We decided to stop not only because it looked interesting, but because we also needed a car break. We entered the shop and the building looked early 1900s with a musty smell, cracked paint, hanging electrical wires, creaky floorboards, cracks running up the walls and piles of rubble in the corners and even some in the aisles. Honestly, we had seen better organized garage sales. Behind a front counter sat a little old lady, probably in her 60s or 70s, reading a book. We looked around and, surprisingly, my wife found an interesting little soapstone sculpture hiding in a heap. It had "$10" scrawled on its little handwritten sticker price tag, so we brought it to the counter. The woman said "that will be $10 even" and we suddenly realized that neither of us had any cash. My wife apologized to the woman and the woman lifted her hand and said "don't you two worry for a second" and then from under the counter she pulled out an iPhone with a card swiper attachment. She swiped my wife's card, said, "oh good, the connection isn't slow today for once," and we were set to go. We spent the remainder of the trip trying to reconcile the incongruities of that situation. We still have the sculpture. Never underestimate.

 

Seems to me all those things have been quite common for ages with cash. Save for Bitcoin electronic transfers seem to leave a trace and even bitcoin eventually must be converted to standard currency, electronic or otherwise, unless you can buy everything you need with it.

 

The digital world opens up far more opportunities for corruption and bribery than cash ever had. Think of identity theft, holding people's computers hostage (phishing), having your bank information on a hackable network (hopefully your bank has a great IT security department), the ability for someone to hack your bank account and transfer funds. Highly secure networks can also remain undetectable and can fly under the radar of many security tools. Bots, especially those armed with AI, can do immense damage. Even warfare has gone online. The digital world will usher in a entirely new epoch of corruption and arguably already has. You don't need cash to be corrupt. Cash corruption is quickly becoming "old school."

 

Well, after much thought about this subject I have decided the best course of action for me is to offer, with great humility, a place for you to send the dreaded "stuff" and get it out of your life. I'm more than willing to accept this burdensome task.

 

I still say cash is king. That is how we trade around here in GA.

 

That’s called tax cheating. Glad you let them keep their furniture.

 

Well, they started in a big tin shed a few years back. And now they have three big fancy stores on main freeways. I was amazed at how they grew so fast.

 

Want to have some fun? Call the IRS and the state sales tax people. It’s easy to expand when you don’t pay taxes.

 

And what if they ARE paying taxes? You have just them through a LOT of hassle for nothing.