What is societies obsession with carrying cash?

If the merchant has a power or network problem then they can't accept your payment, if you had cash they could.

Obviously the problem is on their side but what are you going to do ?

Jump up and down on your high horse about how they are legally obligated to accept your card or walk out of the premises without your product because you had no cash to pay for it?

No, I'd get over it.

You'd probably call the the cops on them though.

You might be like him one day.Chill .

I'm pretty sure most card payment methods will happily store the transaction and then action it later when connectivity is available (almost like it's been a thought through scenario). Back 20 years ago, most terminals would automatically phone home after midnight to bulk process the transactions.

Both (cash and card) will be available but access to cash and it's use will continue to diminish, give it a decade and it'll start being like cheques (and the cost of using cash will keep going up accordingly).

Still use cash on the odd occasion myself but mostly for person to person (and revolut is better here anyway) transactions, can't remember the last time I used it in a shop.

I'll also add, for the OP's situation, tills have a suspend function which lets you pause and come back to a transaction, a good cashier will put the slowcoach to the side to count their pennies and move on with everyone else rather than holding up the entire queue.

@downtheroad 'I've no issue with others using cash'

You just thanked a post above yours saying that only drug dealers, tax evaders and old biddies use cash.

As I said in one of my first posts in this thread, the extreme bitterness and resentment against cash does not match the feigned indifference about it.

"Oh yeah I don't care whether anyone uses cash except [20 pages of extreme anti-cash invective]"

If your real position was "Yeah personally I prefer card payments but hey whatever" you would not be writing the posts you are writing, the way you have written them.

Most don't check in real time, the account will go into debit and the customer charged by the bank for going negative (unless they have an overdraft facility). The payment system (mastercard/visa/whoever) take on the risk for customers abusing this and charge retailers (via a % of each transacation) and customers (via interest/penalties) accordingly. I'm pretty sure cards can still be done manually on paper (using the in-triplicate machine) and put through later on.

The POS (point of sale)/till system was down rather than the payment system.

The account goes into negative and the customer is charged for an unauthorized overdraft.

Card payment machines on aircraft generally work this way.

Well you have tills and staff for that.

Because you're not so stupid as to rely solely on networks and electronics in the first place. There might be a problem you see.

That was card only from the get go, there was never a cash option at the event that day.

If a business offers both card and cash, a power or network outage should have less impact on their ability to process cash transactions.

What if it breaks during a journey? Is the driver not still owed the fare?