Yes, I've heard all about the benefits of cash on HN, but the millions of man years saved by not standing in line has to be worth something too. One Auchan was boasting that they got line time down to 4 minutes. In NL, anythng longer than 30 seconds is unusual.

If you come to Austrian supermarkets at rush hour, the lines will last several minutes. It not uncommon to hear disgruntled customers (usually old people ironically) yell at supermarket employees to open another till after waiting for ages.

There's a lovely under-appreciated privacy about using cash.

In Germany I paid cash for every casual snack-grade transaction, and some bigger ones like restaurant meals. It seemed totally normal and I was happy with that.

In Denmark I never saw the currency at all and I have no idea what it looks like. I never used it and I never saw anyone else use it. Contactless everywhere.

I much prefer cash and regret its disappearance from use in my own country - we are about half-way between the German and Danish experiences above, perhaps closer to the Danish end. A holiday in Germany felt more like a holiday because of this detail. What it feels like when you actually live there is another question.

But this stuff about cash is something of a distraction from the question of metal use - it's increasingly apparent that although electric cars may be an improvement on oil-driven ones, they are not in any useful way the solution. Being rid of cars and basically all powered individual transport may be both dreary and extreme, but what alternative is there?

Anthropomorphic global climate change is absolutely a real problem and we should do more to reduce carbon emissions. But reliable, high-speed personal mobility has brought about a tremendous improvement in quality of life. There's no way I'll agree to give up owning personal cars.

Nah. I used to hope that moving propulsion to the electric grid would allow us to use renewables to drive transport and so do it all for almost nothing. And I also thought that it was vital to sell a solution, to come up with replacements that people would not just accept but actively choose. And that these could lead to a sustainable world.

But it's not true. It's wishful thinking, the dreamer's position, it's the ideological one. The scientific position is that none of this is remotely enough, for reasons like those discussed in the article above. Cars will be got rid of, one way or another - we don't have the resources to sustain them except at the cost of, well, us. The question is just whether we can find a way to sell that idea to ourselves and reorganise ourselves before it happens for us.

As I said, it's dreary and it feels extreme and I don't like it, but I don't see what alternative there is. The brilliant and engaging ideas just don't add up.

Why wouldn't we?

I understand the concerns about everything being logged digitally, but it is just so much more convenient than carrying a bulky wallet with a coin pouch, and messing around with coins at the till holding everyone up for ages. For some reason people think it's a binary choice between privacy or convenience, but it doesn't have to be that way.

I have started going out without my wallet recently, one less thing to lose, and just paying with my phone everywhere.

Meanwhile when you loose your physical wallet, it takes day or weeks, plus trips and legal paperwork to issue new cards, IDs, driver's license, etc. It's a complete nightmare.

In this thread where the assumption is cashless & wallet-less, I have to ask: buying a new phone with what?

Seems like you'd need a friend to spot you a few hundred until you got your access back…

Your bank still issues you physical debit and credit cards, bedside your digital ones, no? Cards which you can leave at home as backup, no?

At least that's the case for me and everyone I know in Europe.

Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.

I can't ask my employer to pay me in cash and keep my payslips private from the government.

Now: while cash is still normal, just about everywhere has contactless credit card terminals. I don’t even get a second glance when I ask to pay with a card at the bakery for a 3 EUR purchase. Some food trucks won’t take cash.

However, we did pay for our 17k EUR used car with cash last year, and that is still the recommended way for private used car sales.

It has gotten better after the Pandemic.

Germans use outdated tech because it works. They use cash very rapidly and efficiently. I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscalization

That's not a good argument for progress in general. We'd still be in the stone age with that mentally.

This is also a reflection on the lack of digitalization and IT/tech innovation in Germany and Austria in general vs other European countries that tend to adopt tech earlier.

>I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.

I'd beg to differ when there's lots of change and coins involved.

Some could be fast with an abacus but that doesn't mean we're not all better off with pocket calculators.

Like with many things, just because that's how Germany does a thing, doesn't mean it's great.

But I think people miss how well do things work in Germany despite the low (IT) tech. I didn’t understand it until I moved here.

//edit: Cashless might imply debit card is accepted, but not necessarily credit cards. Though these are catching up.

For groceries at the usual chains (Edeka, Lidl, Aldi,...) cashless always works, and from my POV always did. For a while many stores only accepted cashless for sales above 10 Euros, but I only know one shop that still has that antique rule. In the past paying by card was something you did for "bigger" expenses; I'm young enough to only have witnessed how that seems to have phased out, but I definitely got strange looks when I payed for an inexpensive item by card. These days most cashiers don't blink an eye when I do so for a <1 Euro item.

As a rule of thumb, the more expensive a place is and the less shady (as in "might cook the books" or "not a drinking hole"), the more likely it is to accept cashless. The "expensive" barrier is coming down ever since: 15 years ago I might have needed cash for a restaurant with the average dish costing 20 Euros, or going out with friends to drink. These days it's safe to assume "if customers are expected to sit down, and pay 10 Euro+, then cashless is probably accepted". Exceptions apply, like that one, new (post-COVID!) restaurant, which insists on cash; and also I go to other places like I did two decades ago while being a pupil or student.

When I go out in our city (six digit populace) I usually assume that I can pay cashless, though if I know the next ATM to be unpleasently far away, I make sure that me or a companion has enough cash, just in case. I still pack some cash when venturing into an unknown town/city.

Overall, I think due to COVID more cusomters now use the option to pay cashless; the only huge impact in acceptance (that I noticed) seems to have been bakeries around here.

It's important to remember that, while Germany is about the size of one of the US's states, it's much more densely populated and has vast differences in customs, traditions and subtile social norms like cash vs cashless.

Later, I handed the cashier two twenties and change was dispensed from a mechanical dispenser. Took ten seconds or so, plus or minus.

No, I don't use any of those shitty products you mention.

In what universe

No need to create more CO2 for the packaging and transport of groceries to your door if the supermarket is on your way from work anyway. Plus you get to pick the exact fruits and veggies you like yourself.

I assume you have a US viewpoint where grocery delivery is common but this is not a thing for consumers in Austria outside of the capital. It also costs extra so there's that.

Either you vastly exaggerate the time savings of card payments, or credit card machines in your community are more reliable than what we have here. Don't brag too hard about living in the future, however, because here we often have the option of self-checkout, which typically is faster than even looking at a cashier. (Unless one of the oldsters who annoy you so has wandered into that lane and now contemplates the scanner as if it were the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. In that case one might offer assistance? Most of our self checkouts take cash!)

The day will come when all purchases will require the approval of several more parties than the buyer and the seller. We will not enjoy that circumstance, so people wiser (and perhaps less hurried?) than you will use cash as long as we can.

Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak.

Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?