i promise to pay the bearer of
Now, being the technophobic luddite that you all know me to be, this will come as a bit of a surprise: t’other day I not only used a contactless form of payment but then actually declined the offer of the receipt. No, really. Okay, it was only a fiver at my local Costa but one-small-step-for-man and all that malarkey. Consequently, as I’m down with the cashless kids as opposed to their paper-money parents, I initially thought it was a backwards-step when I heard that New York’s city council had officially made it illegal for shops to refuse cash payments and enforce every business to make provision to receive payment for their worthy goods & services in cash, non-negotiable.
Obviously, the move was intended to ensure those without bank accounts, credit cards or a go-faster smarty-pants phone, were still able to participate in whatever retail therapy so took their fancy, but the more I thought about it, the more grateful I became. Study after study highlights we automatically and, often unintentionally, spend more when we pay digitally. I think our wires must get crossed and we confuse how easy it is to pay for something with how easily we can afford it. Unsurprisingly, the two don’t always concur.
Some of this is explained by the delayed pain offered by credit but I’m sure that ‘splashing the cash’ just feels more immediately real, and actually parting with it, in pounds, shillings and pence, is tangibly tougher. It’s as if a well-dressed and slightly judgemental bank manager has personally counted out the cash for us, note by note, and they’re going to do their damnedest to make sure we don’t needlessly fritter it away. Mind, by the same token, I also, and somewhat contra-dictatorially, feel that a purchase with cash is in some way more rewarding and somehow more appreciated, more deserved.
As it transpires, frictionless payment has clinically embedded itself into the fabric of society to such an extent it has led to the coining of the phrase ‘tyranny of convenience’ whereby payment tech allows us to more easily get what we want, even though, ironically, the real enjoyment perhaps came from ‘the wanting’ as opposed to ‘the having’? And from a commercial perspective, who can blame companies from focusing on stimulating the purchasing endorphins of those more likely to make a purchase, more swiftly and less intentionally.
All this really highlights is that we’re each a unique bundle of different and often contradictory desires, wants and needs. However, I for one am keen to enhance my perverse miserly joy of not buying something that could very possibly have made me happy, as it makes me even happier to deny some corporation the opportunity of relieving me of my hard-earned. Cash or contactless, Ebenezer Scrooge is not just for Christmas!
