Sainsburys checkout lady said that “lots of people are switching back to cash just now”

[Harpings]

I know it’s just one checkout person. But is this something others have noticed/ are doing? Just wondering if so and why it would be ?

How is this daft? It’s entirely true! I work in a senior position in banking..

I was annoyed the other day when I went to get my eyebrows done (cash only). The cash machine near the salon only had £20 notes but I only needed £10 for my £8 wax.

Then end up £10 short in the bank and a random tenner in my purse that I don't need there.

I would rather use my card or transfer on the bank app and pay the exact amount and not have bits of change that gets wasted.

You do realise that, even if using cash to pay for things is not your preference, that leftover £12 can still be used to buy £12-worth of goods in most shops?! The way you describe it, you'd think that cash is worthless scraps of paper that's no use anywhere!

I'm surprised at some of the people on here who seem so annoyed at and against other people sometimes wanting to use cash. One thing is absolutely certain: we are never going to return to being a cash-only society, so if you want to continue paying with cards, you can still do so almost everywhere.

Just treat the minority of businesses that only accept cash as irrelevant to your life - the same as people without children ignore toy shops, vegetarians ignore butcher's shops and bald men ignore barber shops. Why the frustration at what some other people want to do?

Oh, you have reminded me that I found a scrunched-up £5 note; it looks like it has been in someone's pocket and in the wash! I found a £50 note before the lockdowns and gave this to two charities as I was financially sound. I also found about £80 walking to the shops in the winter when it was dark and raining. Gone be the days of rummaging down the sofa to see if there is any money, so you have enough to buy something or for transport fees.

My Grandad was very much somebody always on the lookout for dropped or lost cash that he could 'rehome'. One day, he was jubilant that he found a fiver dropped underneath a ride when the fair was in town, but his joy was short-lived when, soon afterwards, as per his regular routine, he poked his fingers into the coin-return chamber of a public phone box nearby and found a live goldfish in there.

It's neither convenient nor secure to keep cash as a business, especially not large amounts. It's not good practice either. You may need a safe. You need to be adequately insured. You need to travel to a bank branch to bank cash.

My point earlier was about sole traders and tiny family businesses that don't have large turnovers. If, say, you have a small kiosk down a side-street selling newspapers, drinks and chocolate bars; or a stall selling flowers or fruit and veg, you aren't going to be taking thousands each day. Nobody is suggesting that all of the cash used by customers in Tesco is hung on to, unbanked, and instead just used by the staff to pay their own bills.

££££'s escaping HMRC, which YOU pay via higher taxes. Drug Dealers will use cash for all purchases. More Tax evaded, which us numpties have to suck up. So cheer on the Police Interceptors and the HMRC Teams trying to stem this. Unless you're a masochist, of course.

Why shouldn't we be using/allowed to use cash? Why should citizens be forced by the state to pay for goods and services with a card?

Anyone able to elucidate?

Yes. The only way to tackle illegal activities like tax evasion, drug dealing, and money laundering is to reduce the use of cash as far as possible. I don't think people realise just how bad it is. HMRC's own figures for the "tax gap" show that the "black economy" is the largest component which includes small business tax evasion, "cash in hand" work, illegal sales of duty free booze/fags, etc. It costs the UK taxpayers tens of billions of pounds per year!

It's endemic. Just been to get a quote for repairs to some cosmetic damage on my car - "proper" firm, not a bloke doing it from his driveway - he gave me a written quote including VAT, and then said with a wink, he'll knock the VAT off if we pay by cash and don't want a paper receipt! Same happened last year when we had work to our roof - both the roofers and scaffolders offered to knock off the vat if we paid in cash "nudge nudge wink wink". That's not just the VAT they're ripping off the taxpayer, they won't be paying income tax on it either, and their workers are probably being paid "cash in hand" so evading tax and NIC too!

A few years ago, I ordered a brand new phone from ebay. No problem, it came within a couple of days, brand new, clearly unopened, etc. The seller made a mistake though as he'd packed it in a Currys carrier bag and in the bag was his receipt - he'd paid cash for it the morning I ordered it and posted it in the afternoon. The thing was that he'd paid more than I paid him. So, basically it was money laundering - there's no other possible explanation. I bought it from him, he went out and bought it in cash, and then posted it to me. Why would he do any of that if it wasn't for money laundering? The only other explanation is that he was a complete idiot and I think money laundering is more likely!

Most Tradesmen HATE being paid in cash, especially when business banking is mostly online and paying in cash is a nightmare. I do DH’s books and had to set up a dummy bank feed in the accounting software to account for cash payments.
DH gets quite a few customers wanting to pay cash because they don’t trust bank transfers or card readers, he always tries to avoid taking cash but some wont budge.
It’s getting hard to spend cash when out and about, we were away with family last week and DH had £1k in cash to pay for meals, buy the kids stuff etc. You would not believe how difficult it was to use cash.
The hotel refused at first for the 2 x £140 meal bills, they then relented and said no change would be given 🙄 how is that legal? DD had paid for the hotel and park tickets so we were paying for meals.
Car parks didn’t take cash. Neither do electric charging points.
Paultons Park has a cashless policy ( unless it’s for the win a prize booths, they’ll take any amount of cash there) The 1st day we ate at the far end of the park and he would have had to go back to the entrance to buy a gift card with cash then use that in the food court 🙄, so he paid the £70 by card.
2nd day he put £100 on a gift card for lunch and spends for the kids - we left early so DD had the card, after the kids had chosen toys, there was £10 left, which they wouldn’t refund as they couldn’t refund it onto a card! So they all bought sweets.
We went on to Windsor for 2 nights, hotel said no to cash for food/ bar so we ate and drank elsewhere. I couldn’t pay for a spa treatment with cash so they lost that money too.

The majority of cafes were card only, we ended up with sandwiches and tea from a bakery and ate them on a bench by the river.
What do all these places do when the card machines go down?

@BorgQueen

What do all these places do when the card machines go down?

It's not a problem because it happens VERY rarely. Yes, we hear occasionally of, say, Asda's tills being "down", but that's usually Asda's till software, not the merchant account system behind it. And if their till software goes down, they can't take cash either!

Likewise when the power goes down - the businesses can't operate because without power, they've no heating, lighting nor security, their tills won't work so can't read bar codes for pricing, etc, and probably can't even open the till drawer for change.

Yes, sometimes a bank's system goes down, but it's usually sorted very quickly.

When our city was hit by Storm Desmond, we had no power, no landlines, no mobile signals, etc. Literally everything closed. Trains didn't stop at the railway station, buses didn't run, shops stayed closed. None of that was lack of a card processing machine, it was lack of power meaning it was unsafe to have public in train and bus stations, unsafe to have people in shops and supermarkets, etc.

DH has a sum up machine, cheap to buy and reasonable fees, simple to use - people just don’t like it, he hasn’t used it at all this tax year, just as well there isn’t a monthly fee.

90% of his customers pay by bank transfer as a lot are Landlords and need the paper trail, 10% in cash , mainly for larger amounts and by older people wanting their boilers fixed.

Yes. The only way to tackle illegal activities like tax evasion, drug dealing, and money laundering is to reduce the use of cash as far as possible.

So something that has legitimately been used in everyday life by ordinary people for thousands of years has to be scrapped, just because of people who abuse it?

Is the only way to stop house fires for us to ban matches? The only way to stop bike thefts is to ban people from owning bikes?

Be careful what you wish for. Once cash is gone completely, the government will seek to exploit the fact that they can know everything you buy. Currently, they can only see how much you spent in total with one retailer, but I can well see how systems will get a little more sophisticated so that all of your purchases can be itemised.

Those old enough to remember ration books will see the modern digital equivalent, whereby you're either charged a much higher rate of tax on 'bad' items or outright forbidden from buying them outright. This could easily be linked to NHS records of your weight. No longer any need for your GP to ask you how much you drink or smoke, or how healthy your diet is, as all your purchases are already monitored and recorded and they can already see your individual 'scores'.

Suppose you're pregnant and are trying to buy alcohol as a present for somebody else, that could be banned too, maybe with an automatic email sent to your GP to report you. Plus, if you're 'found out' buying formula milk and have not had it 'OK'd' by a HCP that you're certified as unable to breastfeed - that could be something else that they tax heavily or ban outright until you have official 'permission'.

None of this is very much of a jump at all - China is already doing pretty much exactly this. I can't understand why people are so desperate to see the option of cash, alongside other digital methods, eliminated.

Yes best to use cash where possible for this reason

WRT tax evasion I’m far more concerned about massive global companies who make millions here but pay no tax here.
i mean I can’t use my cash on Amazon.

Not forgetting that if cash got abolished - then banks could charge us just for having accounts with them - whereas, at present, it's easy enough to have a "free" bank account (technically-speaking - as, in actual fact they don't usually pay us interest on OUR money sitting in THEIR bank). I'm sure there's all sorts of other ways we could be charged for having no choice but to pay by card (or bank transfer) if it was known we had no other option. At present we can turn round and go "No thanks - I'll pay the price it says it is....".

But - yep.....I also don't want to know I could be tracked literally the second I spent any money and I wouldnt put it past the Government to start deciding whether they were going to "approve" or "disapprove" of my purchases (bad enough that banks at present are trying to use OUR money to stop us expressing our own political opinions or paying it in in cash).

I'm sure the person who lost it is now a lot happier that they don't need to carry cash anymore and thus no longer at risk of losing what could have been a substantial amount of money for them!

Idk - there seems to be a massive amount of fraud through scams, identity theft, cloned cards…..?

And most of the time, the cardholder will get refunded if they've done nothing wrong and reported it promptly.

When you lose cash, you lose it, unless in the very rare case that whoever finds it actually makes an attempt to trace the person who lost it.

Yes I think you are right.

I remember In the 80s you had to keep at least £100 in your account for free banking

Sounds like rubbish?? You obviously have no idea what’s going on in China.

Paying by cash isn't a conspiracy theory; it's how everyone paid until recently, legal tender, and much easier to budget.

This.......little benefit to us.

Governments can demand that your bank reveals transactions on your account (tax fraud mainly).

Also, don't forget that Al Capone was eventually imprisoned for tax evasion, even though he unquestionably committed far worse atrocities than that beforehand.

Don't misunderstand me: jail was very clearly the best place for Capone; but my point is that, if they have the power, governments could very easily use even allegations of tax irregularities (whether true, mistaken or fabricated) against you, even if their main complaint against you is not necessarily related to tax fraud at all.

We've all seen many times how various activists will doxx people and look for any trace of dirt against you, even if it has to be 'manufactured' or facts very heavily twisted, to have you cancelled/smeared/sacked/punished - and a lot of these activists now have the law and influential organisations on their side (not necessarily in the doxxing, but in their core beliefs).

Just because we're all glad that a violent, ruthless gangster ended up in prison when it came to Capone, don't think that any government could never consider you an enemy should you fall out of favour for any reason, and seek to 'deal with you' using any means at their disposal.

In the USA Form 8300 is employed to advise the IRS of any purchase of $10K or more. This has been in place for years to combat money laundering. Here, HMRC is aware of far more than many realise when it comes to transactional analysis. I noticed in a recent BBC programme on evasion how one agent's screen displayed what looked like a spider's mind-map, indicating (I assume) flows into an individual's Bank account, so that untaxed receipts could speedily be identified. The blunt fact is, too many people are blithely content to pay the penalties of tax evasion via the tax the Government then has to raise by other means, sometime subtle (frozen Tax bands) or more directly (on Fuel, Spirits etc). In Stores stealing has been replaced by euphemism after euphemism: first pilferage, currently shrinkage. You can't have it both ways. Cheat the Treasury, but then bitch and gripe about 'unfair' taxes and '... why doesn't the Government do blah blah ...".

By "recently", how many decades do you mean? I was paid by bank transfer (small private firm) from my first payslip in 1983 - that's 40 years ago, 4 decades! I paid my bills by cheque and used credit/debit cards for lots of purchases from bigger shops (granted, small shops tended not to accept cards back then), also used ATM machines to withdraw the small amounts of cash I needed for the smaller purchases. So, basically, I'm in my mid 50's and never used cash extensively at any time in my adult life.

As for "easier to budget", not for many people it's not. By paying by card, cheque, or whatever, you have a printed record of what you've spent and where, so that gives you control and helps you make rational decisions for the future. When it comes to finances, the starting point to getting in control is the data/knowledge of where you stand, your income/spending history, etc., so you can see what you've been spending on etc. Far easier to have all that down in printed in front of you rather than trying to remember what you spent, where.

I get that people evading/avoiding/defrauding their taxes is a big problem for governments - although it seems that they may only have to look closer to home and at some of their great big corporation pals if they really cared about a lot of it.

However, I'm not willing for their response to that to treat me like a naughty child who is assumed guilty. Loads of crimes could be clamped down on or even eliminated completely, by severely restricting people's liberties and personal freedom - it doesn't mean that everybody believes it's a price worth paying.

China 'discouraged' people from leaving their houses during covid by sealing up the doors to their homes and imprisoning them inside - yes, it worked; no, it should never have happened.

How everyone paid, not 'was paid'; I made no mention of wages.
Most supermarkets give printed receipts, so it's quite easy to see what one paid for what item; no need to try to remember.