For me, the main drawback is rather than you need to get to a machine to get your physical money pieces regularly. Sometimes you run out, there’s no machine, or you have no time to find one, and it can put you in troubles, like being stuck in the middle of transit or getting at the cashier and realizing you don’t have enough.
Before I kind of blundered unintentionally into going mostly cashless, I’d just get cash out when I went grocery shopping. But thankfully by the time I was in charge of my own money it was pretty rare to need to spend money without the option of paying via EFTPOS.
It was pretty common to hear people talk about it for a span of about 10-20 years in Australia. For as long as I can remember every bank gave you a card that was not a “true” credit or debit card, but would work in the EFTPOS machines of any domestic store. They were called Redicards, and were basically debit cards you couldn’t use online (once internet shopping became a thing), but worked in ATMs, stores etc. Even back in the 00s it was rare to see someone pulling out a cheque book to pay for anything, and now it’s basically unheard of. Talking to US friends I get the impression Australia beat them to this level of wide-spread electronic payments, by quite a margin.
This year the Redicard network is shutting down and I just got issued a second Visa debit card by my bank to replace it. End of an era…
Your in a cash+card hybrid country, right? In my country at least, you can go into a chain grocery store, buy somthing (doesnt matter what) and pull a small to medium amount of cash from your card. They are (slowly as to not alert people) trying to tear that system down and go cashless.
For me, the main drawback is rather than you need to get to a machine to get your physical money pieces regularly. Sometimes you run out, there’s no machine, or you have no time to find one, and it can put you in troubles, like being stuck in the middle of transit or getting at the cashier and realizing you don’t have enough.
Before I kind of blundered unintentionally into going mostly cashless, I’d just get cash out when I went grocery shopping. But thankfully by the time I was in charge of my own money it was pretty rare to need to spend money without the option of paying via EFTPOS.
Thanks for teaching me the abbreviation EFTPOS.
Welcome :)
It was pretty common to hear people talk about it for a span of about 10-20 years in Australia. For as long as I can remember every bank gave you a card that was not a “true” credit or debit card, but would work in the EFTPOS machines of any domestic store. They were called Redicards, and were basically debit cards you couldn’t use online (once internet shopping became a thing), but worked in ATMs, stores etc. Even back in the 00s it was rare to see someone pulling out a cheque book to pay for anything, and now it’s basically unheard of. Talking to US friends I get the impression Australia beat them to this level of wide-spread electronic payments, by quite a margin.
This year the Redicard network is shutting down and I just got issued a second Visa debit card by my bank to replace it. End of an era…
Your in a cash+card hybrid country, right? In my country at least, you can go into a chain grocery store, buy somthing (doesnt matter what) and pull a small to medium amount of cash from your card. They are (slowly as to not alert people) trying to tear that system down and go cashless.