By Katy Nguyen, Staff Writer
No cash in your wallet? Today, it is not uncommon to walk out and about and not carry a single dollar. Credit cards, debit cards, Apple pay, Android pay, Venmo and more, everything is digital now. In this day and age, cash can potentially come to a decline.
“Cash is the least secure form of payment,” says Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of internet services. If you lose cash, it’s gone forever once someone picks it up. Cash is untraceable.
Imagine yourself standing in a long line waiting to pay for your item and the person in front of you takes forever looking for exact change. When you use cashless payment methods, you eliminate the time spent digging through your coin purse. This rapid payment makes it easier for stores to make money faster than ever before.
Managing your money also becomes much easier with digital banking. You can control your limits at your own expense. The money is there, but you just can’t see it. This makes it so much easier to overspend.
In 2016, the government in India made a huge demonetization effort by removing more than 80 percent of the smaller banknotes. As a result, there was an increase of digital wallets being used. Another motive for demonetization is that by completely removing cash, illegal activities like black market smuggling, tax dodging, might become more difficult. Yet, that seems unlikely to happen.
According to Capital One, one third of millennials claim that they rarely or never carry around cash anymore. With the future of stores, like Amazon Go where there are no checkout lines, not having cash doesn’t seem as much of a problem as it did a few decades ago.
However, surprisingly enough, Capital One also claims that 41 percent of Americans still carry cash regularly. The thing is, most of them only keep it for emergencies.
With everything being digital, you might think the chances of bank robberies are lower. But, hackers can still steal your credit card information. Tech companies are looking towards resolving these issues with tokenized identification systems and biometrics.
Not everyone has access to such technology, so it doesn’t seem like cash is disappearing any time soon. But, millennials and the younger generation are fast to adapt to these changes. For now, we will just wait and see whether anyone cashes out on cash.
