Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Is cash such a bad thing?

More and more society is moving away from the use of cash. There are serious proposals to do away with cash and move completely to electronic money. While the emphasis of these proposals tends to be reducing money laundering and other large scale illegal or anonymous uses of cash, I have yet to see an explanation of how we'll eliminate cash for the many everyday small cash transactions many of  us engage in.

I just returned from vacation. While on vacation, I flew, stayed at a nice hotel, and used a special shuttle bus to travel between venues. In each case, following custom, I tipped porters, drivers, valets, bellhops, and similar employees. While easy today with cash, how to tip isn't clear in a cashless society. It takes 1-2 seconds to hand somebody a few dollars as a tip and continue on my way. So far there are no electronic payment methods which are this simple. The best I could guess with today's technology is:

  1. Pull out my phone.
  2. Go to some payment / tipping app.
  3. Hope the other person has a phone with a compatible app.
  4. Do whatever is needed to transfer a few dollars.
This is a 1-2 minute process with any technology I currently own, much more time consuming than the old method. I would love to hear a proposal on how tipping of this sort can work without cash. Note this is tipping independent of any other transaction -- restaurant, taxi, hair stylist, etc. tips are currently handled when paying by credit card, but for porters, valets, etc. there's no transaction to add the tip to.

It appears there are some attempts at solving the tip problem -- an electronic "tip jar" -- but this only appears to solve some fixed location problems (e.g. coffee shop counters). And the tip amount is fixed -- perhaps the really good hotels will be known because the bellhop's tip device will be set in increments of $20.00.

Some might say the new "living" minimum wage means we no longer need to tip, and there is some truth to this -- in the past porters, valets, etc. were often only paid in tips and today probably need to get minimum wage. While a higher minimum wage guarantees a higher income, I imagine many service personnel will end up making less money after being paid the new "living" wage in lieu of tips.

And, of course, there are the really serious issues of cashless society. Like strip clubs. For those who don't want to read the link, there is at least one club which lets you pay for private dances with a credit card (with transaction fees taking 25% of the total, so both the customer and stripper lose money). But nothing about how to replace dollar tips for the girl on stage.