An old joke, I love the thread drift: Add 30% time if a lady cashier Add 15% time for each lady customer Add 10% time for every child under 6th grade Add 5% time for every 5 years over retirement age Bob Wilson
Just ordered more checks from Costco. Took 5 days to arrive, free shipping. Choose the 3 week free shipping option and they'll arrive as fast as the 5 day expedited $10 shipping fee. Yes, we write them, for utilities. After the nightmare of attempting to undo the automatic payments from my Mom's estate, I settled on keeping up the 1960's practice for certain payments. We do have auto pay on many services though.
Scan and Go. I used to eschew these devices because, being in a buggy-whip industry myself I can sympathize with the cashiers....but ......now even in the dreaded Walmart I'm in and out VERY quickly. I do not think that I have written a physical check in well over a decade.
Geesh, I remember up the coast in Powell River, in maybe grade 4, they marched us all down to the local bank to open savings accounts, got our bank books, learned the intricacies of filling in a check... Preparing us for the future. Is there even such a thing as a traditional bank book anymore? The wife and I went up to that town last summer, second time in maybe 20 years. The main town is pretty much a ghost town: that bank for example is completely boarded up, ditto for the shopping centre. There's a beautiful old brick building post office (also boarded up). It had brass on the front doors, marble stair case, brass hand rails, brass mail boxes, hardwood counters, the old marble water rollers (for wetting your stamps). The whole show, mothballed. Oh, there's a brew pub in the shipping entrance, round the side... Everything was built by the main employer (pulp and paper), between 1910~1920, a real time capsule.
I think we are headed toward a cashless society that way big brother knows everything. As with all change it can be used for good or bad.
Last time we were following Coronation Street, they were still talking about "pay packets", being envelopes with cash. That was at least a decade back though. I like cash because it it at least makes me feel like I'm putting the brakes on runaway spending; plastic spending is too damn easy.
that's why vegas traded cash for plastic. maybe pay more taxes, but more than made up for in maxed out charge cards.
Also it allows Chinese Padroo to open accounts 100x more easily than the old paper days: we need the Russian Padroo, Jamaican Padroo and Chinese Padroo to have the same access to our credit that we have. It’s the only equitable thing to do.
You think you are writing a check but it is treated like a debit card when they hand the check back to you, it is a pure cashless transaction. You wrote a check and they just turned it into an electronic transaction.
I don’t get my check back, landlord, restaurant, etc still physically bring them to the bank at which point it’s electronic . Reality is we have accepted convience over security, “wire fraud” rates have gone up over 100x in the last 20 years Network Security has not improved, detection of ifraud has but that’s a rather sad state of affairs.
... which will make weather events and natural disasters and warfare actions that take down the power grid and communication systems, even more catastrophic. Those hazards don't (yet) halt cash transactions at the grocery store or farmers market.
The old saying "The Checks in the Mail" will really get you when someone young says, " Whats A Check".
We use a lot of terms from the old days even though the process has changed, here is one. A guy I worked with had a teenage daughter. While going somewhere in his brand new Ford Focus base he told his daughter to"roll her window up", she looked at the door and said " Where is the button"? He looked at her and realized his kids grew up with all power windows and laughed. He took his hand and pointed to the crank on the door and with a rolling motion of his hand explained that is where the term rolling up a window came from. This same girl is now a doctor. DAH
I received a cheque in the mail just yesterday. And paid an invoice using a fax machine. The old technology still works, and in some ways is better. I've never heard of someone hacking a fax, while casting all our personal details into the aether seems a tad risky.....OK, so I'm officially 'old'. I remember when a first class postage stamp was eight cents, and a litre of gas was twenty three cents. But I still have my hair, my teeth, and most of my mind, and I'm not going without a fight.
Actually in the Mid to late 90's one way of hacking was to come in through a fax/printer/copier via the phone line and out via the network cable for the printer. In the 2000s the fax got dumbed down so that was not possible. I used to set up internet faxing, where the operator thought they were using the phone line but the 'fax' was actually printed via the Internet. It was a feature we had to drop. (Kinda silly, by the 2000s the hackers were not even using phone lines. Closing the barn door after the horses were gone)
