Cash or card? The New “Paper or Plastic”?
I was at a grocery store a few days ago. I do that a lot. Usually after one of those “Hey, while you’re out” messages I get from Marianne. I don’t find it a big deal because I really am in a position to drive by any one of a number of places where we shop on my daily drive home from the office. But, um, I am getting off track. Where were we.
Yes – the idea of going shopping is not unusual in the least, and hardly a topic for a decent blog post. What was interesting, though, was when I went to check out.
This particular store has multiple “self checkout” stations and one old-fashioned checkout lane where you put your items on the conveyor belt and the cashier scans and bags your groceries. I almost always do the self-serve version, especially if I only have a few items. But this time there was a line for self-checkout and none at the normal cashier, so there I went, for a little old-fashioned retail pampering.
The cashier gave me a serious look and asked “how do you plan to pay for this?” For a split second I remembered that I had not shaved in a couple of days and was wearing blue jeans that could have looked nicer. Yes, my office is still lightly attended after Covid, and I am able to wear just about anything there so long as court or clients are not involved. I thought of responding “Please sir, I can pay.”
That was not, however, what the guy meant. “Card or cash” was his clarifying statement. Which immediately made me feel better about my appearance. This question, however, threw me as well. “Cash?” I thought, followed by: “Who uses cash?” My audible response was “Card”, which was all the guy needed to hear because he must have been out of change or something. It was at that moment I realized how much the world has changed.
I remember when the only places that would take credit cards were gas stations and department stores – so long as you had a card for that particular establishment or chain. Once other places opened themselves to taking credit cards, the ability to go to McDonalds when I had 23 cents in my pocket seemed magical.
But even then, having cash in my pocket tended to be my method of budgeting for day-to-day expenses. $X went in when I deposited a paycheck and when that was gone, that was it until next payday. I did not say that it was a good budgeting system. After cards became an option, I sometimes felt funny using them – what if I only wanted a cup of coffee? Or I had a hankering for a candy bar from a convenience store? I felt embarrassed and self-conscious whipping out a credit card for a purchase of $1.09 or something. Sometimes I would even buy more than I really wanted just so that I would not feel weird about the encounter.
Somewhere along the line, my reticence to use plastic for a $1 value burger or a package of Twinkies vanished. Nowadays Mr. Merchant (or Mr. Multi-National Conglomerate), I don’t care how small the purchase – you are getting plastic from me. This is because I have all but stopped carrying cash. Card at the grocery, card at the gas pump, card at the drive-up window, everyone gets my card. And when someone in a grocery checkout asks up front, I am surprised when I am forced to remember that some people are still using cash.
There are times I wonder if I shouldn’t go back to the old method. Everyone in the world who can hack into a computer with any proficiency at all can peer at my purchase history. [Go ahead, peruse away. I can wait for a minute.] I don’t really care because I am not buying bazookas or rounds of drinks at strip clubs or ordering subversive literature online. I am buying Quarter Pounders, gas at Costco and occasionally some green, leafy vegetables and fresh fruit to supplement my regular diet of salt, fat and sugar. [Pro tip – an occasional stalk of celery or a few grapes will do wonders for making you feel better about the other choices you make in life.]
From time to time, however, my contrary streak surfaces. “It’s nobody’s darned business what I choose to buy or eat or read” is the thought that emerges. If I paid with cash, I suppose that snoopy people could still compile a dossier on me, but it would be a lot more work and would probably include going through my trash. Which is one more reason to not wash out the big blue wheeled trash can outside. There is simply no reason to make life easier for intrusive life-nannies.
But then the practical side resurfaces and I succumb to the lure of convenience and whip out the card. It has been awhile since I routinely heard “Paper or plastic” when it comes time to bag the groceries. Using ever-cheaper paper sacks has sort of cured me of my romantic desire to live in the past by chasing the rolling apples that escape through the gaping tear that always seems to happen to at least one paper sack. So I suppose that whether the choice is in the container for getting groceries home or the method of financing to get them out of the store, I will have to answer that I am Team-Plastic all the way.
J. P.'s Blog 
The transition to plastic has been a subtle one, but still seemingly quick. It’s a mixed bag – convenience injected with the ability to totally lose track of what you are spending.
A few weeks ago Mrs. Jason was out of town. A new loveseat (ordered only six months prior) arrived at the store. They called about delivery. I asked how they wanted me to pay; they said a card or check (remember those?) was fine. I did not want that on the card especially since I had cash. Thus my statement to them – “uh, the wife is out of town and guess who has the checkbook? Will you take cash?”. I was also being considerate given how the card would have cost them 3% or so. The delivery guy was mighty uneasy taking my stack of $100 bills.
Plastic really is a mixed bag. And I long ago gave up any embarrassment about using a card for a $0.72 ounce (yes, it was long ago) fountain soda.
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The only transactions I have done with $100 bills in recent years is buying or selling cars. These cars were probably in the same general expense category as a new piece of furniture, but still. Several years ago the bank I used for a client trust account announced that it was not going to accept cash deposits. I had to jump through some hoops with the local management to explain that the people I was collecting money from were often the kinds of people who did not have access to a bank account, and going to buy a bunch of money orders was expensive and a hassle. They worked with me in the end, but I don’t think the situation is going to get better in that way.
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J. P., if I had more money, I’d be cash all the way for most small purchases. In fact, I am for most purchases under 20 bucks anyway. Follow my logic here, it’s not that I prefer cash, or to walk around with cash, it’s that I don’t want to check and certify all the debits from my account every month. Why don’t the sub-30’s find this annoying? Because they don’t do it, they just assume whatever their instant information is telling them is correct. And yes, I HAVE found errors between what the store was charging me, and what my statement says. When I went into the bank to rectify, the bank person said: “…wow, nobody keeps these records and checks…”. A couple of Pennie’s here and there out of every account, and your bank could be grafting millions!
It terms of money management, there used to be your “walking around money” I.e. your money you had to spend between paychecks that you could use to buy drinks at a bar, a lunch here and there, etc. when that money was gone, you didn’t do that stuff until your paycheck came around again. It was part of your budgeting. People don’t think like that anymore, and it’s how they end up with $35.00 overdraft fees for buying a $3.00 cup of coffee. BTW, I’ve had to explain to more millennials that the bank doesn’t have to debit your account in order of charging, they can do it any way they want, and many close the debits at the end of the day, from largest to smallest. This is how the kids think they’re going to get one overdraft for a big purchase at the end of the day, and end up getting that posted first and three overdrafts for cups of coffee that were posted after that.
Let’s not even talk about checks, and the amount of people allowing third parties to debit money out of their accounts, automatically, before they even see or agree to, the charges! You want money from me? You send me a statement I can review, and if I agree with it, I send you a check.
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BTW, service industry tips? Always cash, and when I’m fine dining, I bring enough to cover what I think it will be. Even in a coffee shop, if I’m paying by card, it’s a cash tip.
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Interesting Idea – I always add it to the card, but you make a great point. My boys used to get some decent cash tips when they worked at a local golf course – cash was convenient for the golfers because many of them were making bets all through the 18 holes, so someone always had a wad of the stuff. I remember laughing when the oldest one figured out that the more the foursome had to drink on the course, the better the tips were. 🙂
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Andy, I resisted setting up those automatic preauthorized chequing accounts for years, but finally did, for both my mom and myself. I did this for the utility bills after I realized I had not received a bill and it rolled into the next month with extra charges. I’m amazed how much time it saves for online bill paying BUT I still make the utilities send me an emailed or paper copy of the monthly bill, so I can check the amount and then I check them off whenever I’m reconciling my bank account. The only bill I did not set up was my Visa, as if it got lost and someone rang up some charges, I didn’t want it paid automatically, and the property taxes. But for everything else, I find it’s a real time-saver.
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Joni, I remain unconvinced. We have third world mail service in my neck of the woods, but that’s an entirely different problem they need to fix, and I tell my bill senders they should be dropping the hammer on the poorly managed postal service we are paying too much for, rather than hitting me up for money. I might, in the future, be convinced to pay a bill online that is sent to me for review, and I have a few of those services, but I will never allow a company to take money automatically out of my account!
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We have gotten to where we get paper bills in the mail, but then log onto their websites and pay them online. Even if we are somehow forced to accept electronic billing, you can open and download a copy of the paper bill to check it out. The great thing about this way is that you can run right up to the due date and be sure that you are not late, as they count the date you authorize the transaction as the date of the payment, even though the card charge will not settle for a few days.
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I remember trying an early version of “bank by phone” back in the late 80s. I saw it as a great time-saver, until I tried it in action. You had to enter merchant account numbers with the touch pad, and then the bills were paid by – – – the bank writing checks to the merchants. Who got paid later than if I had just written my own check out and mailed it as I normally did. After getting a couple of late fees I decided that I had experienced enough of the 80s and went back to the 60s and 70s ways of paying bills that I had learned from my parents.
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I don’t do phone banking at all, as I don’t have the app for it and don’t really trust it, and don’t want one, but I did pay online, now they just automatically deduct the bills. As for the PAC, I would say it was time-consuming to set up the PAC (Preauthorized chequing) accounts as I had to call each utility individually and provide them with my bank information, but once it was set up it was great, but I asked for paper or emailed copies so I could keep track of the charges in case of increases or unreasonable amounts. My home heating bill went up considerably this winter. My reason for doing this was who would pay mom’s bills if I got sick, and also for myself, so it provides a bit of security for that. My mother has an farmhouse she rents and the tenant decided she want to do the PAC route as she didn’t have cheques anymore, so the rent is just automatically deposited in mom’s account, saving me the time of running to the bank with the cheque every month.
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I agree that there is a generational difference when it comes to balancing accounts. For awhile, I was doing multiple accounts at once – home checking, office checking, office trust account, and my mother’s checking. Oh, I was the treasurer for our local HOA and for my kids’ Cub Scout pack for awhile too. I got genuinely sick of balancing checkbooks.
Interestingly, the most common error I saw when going through all of the electronic transactions was one never hitting the account. I found more of those errors that worked out in my favor than the other way around. A few years ago Marianne took over paying bills at home – that is the easiest method of all. 🙂
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I’m mostly plastic (although unlike you our money is also plastic so either way I’m on team plastic) and I wonder what the effect is on peoples budgeting skills.
When I first started working we got a paper cheque every Friday, and how much I made was right there for me to see. I still remember the number, $431.03 and we’d take it to the bank, keep what cash we needed for the week and bank the rest. When my budget was up for the week it was quite obvious, as I had no cash left. Now my pay is automatically deposited, I can check the amount but rarely do. I pay for things with a credit card, my wife pays the bill. Other than her occasional questioning I could just go nuts buying stuff and never know, which some people do I suppose.
On the other hand I recall the hassle of my parents getting Traveller’s Cheques when we went on vacation, and on one trip everyone counting their change so we could buy enough gas to get home. So overall I think the modern system is an improvement.
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I remember getting those paper paycheques, and I chose a bank on my way home from work to stop in to deposit. When they got the first bank machines, it was great, unless it was raining, and the machine was mounted on the outside wall of the bank. Bloor and Islington. It was a 25 cent service charge for a withdrawal.
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Your financial life sounds a lot like mine – money deposits electronically, and Marianne does the bills at home so I have no idea which weeks I get paid unless I go to the effort to look it up. We go through peaks and valleys on budgeting, mainly because it is so easy to stop thinking about it when you never have any of the money in your hands.
I remember an early summer job – a potato chip factory – where someone walked all through the plant late every Friday morning handing out paychecks. There was a guy who walked through earlier every morning taking antes ($1 or $2) for anyone who wanted to play “check poker”. The paychecks came out with a 5-digit check number, and your check number was like a 5 card stud poker hand. I think some of the low digits were treated as aces or face cards. That guy came back through in the afternoon checking the “hands” for everyone who participated and presented the pot to the winner. I can’t remember if I won the game one week or not.
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I remember the days when we would write out a cheque at the cash register. That period was brief after moving away from cash. Then for a while I would use my debit card, and I remember the groans from the line behind me thinking that using a plastic card was going to take forever. When it did not, I think a few people were amazed. In that time frame, they still had to swipe your card under an imprint device to capture the raised letters onto a three part credit card form.
It still kills me when I pay in cash and they have no idea how to make change, unless they are in my age bracket. It also irks me when they don’t know how to give the change back into my awaiting palm. Coins first, then the bills on top, not the other way around. Inevitably, some of the coins fall to the counter, or the floor, if they do it bills first.
In Canada cashiers also have to deal with rounding. $5.36 gets rounded down to $5.35, but $5.38 gets rounded to $5.40 for change purposes. We wisely got rid of pennies years ago.
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I know, and nobody misses pennies one little bit! Or dollar bills, we haven’t had them in thirty years.
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I have wondered why we still have pennies and $1 bills. I think they are only useful for beating the states with sales tax out of a little revenue, because something that costs $9.99 triggers a teeny bit less tax than something that costs $10.
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Lee, I actually ate at a fast food restaurant on the road, and the cashier could tell me what I owed, and put the amount I gave her into the cash register information screen, but could not actually take the change information and count it out. I kept telling her it was wrong and she ended up grabbing handfuls of change and basically throwing them at me! The American Century is over.
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You are so right about young peoples’ inability to make change or hand it out properly. This is one more thing in a card’s favor.
I vividly remember the days of checks at the grocery store. My mother always paid with a check. Later, people writing checks became the holdup because the cashier had to call a manager to approve it, and if you got behind someone who was not a regular, you had to wait for them to pull out all kinds of ID to satisfy the manager. And I recall when early card transactions took awhile too.
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Token millennial here: I am all about the self-checkout and all about the plastic. I take it a step further and use my iPhone to pay anywhere that accepts it. Larger cash back percentage, and I’ve always got my phone. The phone notifies me whenever a recurring debit comes out -or any transaction is made- and I pay it off every month. Seems to work great in the couple of years I’ve used it.
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I have gotten sucked into some things like this. I don’t use the phone, but I pay with apps quite a bit. I will order at McDonalds more than I really want to because their app makes it so painless and simple that I don’t even have to dig a card out of my wallet at the drive-up window. There is also Venmo, which is a whole ‘nuther thing, and one more thing that is going to make cash obsolete.
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In our country (Canada) during Covid, retailers asked you not to use cash because they thought it was a way to pass the virus. That seemed to have accelerated the change to a more cashless society.
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I remember that too – and it really didn’t affect me much because I had mostly stopped living with cash in my pocket by then.
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I am like you, I think. It’s just convenient. I do keep some cash in my wallet just in case I am accosted by bakery-wielding Girl Scouts or popcorn-laden Boy Scouts. We no longer have any choice here in Colorado as to paper or plastic bags. The new law says I have to either bring a reusable one or buy one.
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Not having cash when the GS cookies or the BS popcorn is on sale is one of the few ways I keep a check on my waistline. 🙂
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I should probably try that!
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As an interesting aside, after my mom passed, at 88, we were going over her bills, etc. to find a pretty big credit card bill. Turns out she was using one of her credit cards as a defacto debit card, which she thought was safer and didn’t give more people her direct banking info. She basically Mastercharged her entire month, from groceries to hobby, and entertainment purchases, and paid one bill at the end.
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That sort of thing is even more tempting when you have a card that gives rewards points or some other benefit. We have a Visa card we got through Costco. We get a rebate every time we use that card to buy gas at Costco, so guess how we buy gas? Between using that card for gas and for other Costco purchases, our annual membership basically gets paid for us every year by Visa card bonus bucks, or whatever they call them.
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For years I would take cash out for spending money when I deposited my every 2 week paycheck, and when it ran out I stopped spending…..it was a forced system of saving/budgeting that young people can’t relate to when everything goes on credit. (I remember my mother having a system of envelopes with cash inside for various utility bills – whatever was left over was grocery money.) I still carry some cash for incidentals, but debit card everything else, mostly because you can tap and pay most places and not have to touch those germy keys, a system which was encouraged here early in the pandemic. In Feb of this year all stores banned plastic, it’s either paper or reusable cloth for 15 or 30 cents – I have a stack of cloth ones in the car where they permanently reside as I’m still not used to bringing them in the store. Agree – the paper ones always tear.
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I tried the cash-in-envelopes thing for a really short time, but because I didn’t pay most bills with cash, it didn’t really work. I remember working with an older guy who remembered walking with his father on Saturdays to pay bills. Every place a bill was due, the old guy would go personally and pay with cash. I think that practice went out a long time ago.
The best budgeting method I have tried is turning everything over to Marianne for her to handle. 🙂
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HA! My mom did the envelope thing in the 50’s/60’s when $25 would buy groceries for the week and utility bills like phone etc were a lot less. My mother showed some art at a museum in an old building in the town she grew up in – it used to be the hydroelectric building – and as she lived just down the street, she remembered her mother giving her a dollar to go to the hydro building and pay the hydro bill! She said it was during the Depression when she was 13. We went to check out the house, and it was still there and the current owner let her look around inside.
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I still my remember my first apartment, in 1975. A nice neighborhood in a vintage 1920’s courtyard apartment. My average electric company bill was $6.00.
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I’m still in the cash camp, except for large purchases – over $100 or so, I’ll charge it. Budgeting, privacy, traditionalism… all that stuff appeals to me. But I know it’s only a matter of time before cash isn’t accepted at most stores.
Incidentally, few cashiers can actually make change any longer (at least not those who were educated in the US). Making change happens to be something that I’m good at, and I do take a certain pleasure in showing off my change-calculating skills. After all, it was hard-earned. When I was in my 20s, I worked for two years at a store that didn’t have cash registers – all receipts had to be hand-written, and added up on the store’s single adding machine. Most customers would pay cash, and would do something like give me $20.08 for their $14.83 purchase, so that they could get an “even” $5.25 in change. Life was like one long 6th grade math test. But eventually I mastered the art of figuring out change quickly; it’s a dying art.
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I am right there on change-making. I think it was before you started coming here that I wrote about it – https://jpcavanaugh.com/2020/02/28/time-for-a-change/
I mention in there how parents had to staff concession stands at youth basketball games, and I was DA MAN making change out of a simple cash box. I will confess to significant feelings of superiority as others had to do calculations on a pad of paper on the counter.
I wrote in my COAL series that my longtime way of forcing myself to stay within a pre-arranged budget when buying a used car was to come with my maximum allowable price (in cash) in my pocket, and not a bit more. It prevented me from getting swept up in a situation where I ended up shelling out more than I had planned.
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I mostly only use cash now for birthday cards for the nieces and nephews! In large part because the few times I do carry cash, it flies out the door at lightning speed it seems! 🙂
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When my mother was still living, she would give us checks for birthdays. The problem was that we would dawdle taking them to the bank because we didn’t go to a bank often (and this was before the days of being able to deposit checks via a phone app). She would get really upset with us when a couple of months had gone by and the check had not yet been cashed because it made it harder for her to balance her checkbook (as any good midwestern farm girl of German stock did regularly). She finally switched to cash. 🙂
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J.P. You are killin it here…I send one of my nephews a check for his birthday, he lives in a different state, and he even has the service where he just photographs a check to get it posted, and it might take him 2 or 3 months to do it? Are kids that rich now?
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Haha, maybe so. Or maybe he just knows that the minute he deposits the check it will get frittered away on daily expenses and won’t be left for something cool from Uncle Andy.
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🙂 I hear you about checks. When I was a kid, I got checks for my birthday sometimes and I ALWAYS forgot to deposit them haha.
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I am pretty committed to credit cards at this point, although in some limited circumstances, I stick to cash. One is if I have a strong reason to believe that my credit card was stolen through a particular place where I used it (one time this happened, I am pretty sure it was from the laundromat I go to, and I’ve done strictly cash there ever since). The other is when there are minimum purchase amounts required to use a credit card. Usually these are at bars and seem to hover around $10.
On a related note, if you want a 50% shot at getting a free beer (at least from my experience); order a cheap one at a bar with a minimum purchase amount, say you want to close out instead of keep a tab but all you have to pay for it is your credit card and were unaware of the minimum, offer to return the already-opened-but-otherwise-untouched beer back, and wait to see if the bar tender shrugs and gives it to you anyways.
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*Be sure to thank them afterwords if they do.
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Gotta say Z, minimum charge amounts I have not seen in about 10 years where I am. If you’re trying to drive people out of cash, you better not be trying set amounts for how little they can buy and use plastic.
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It’s definitely getting rarer as the years go by, but I still find bars in Indianapolis that have minimum charge amounts. Was at one recently just this past Wednesday.
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Ah, youth and the ways it can figure to save a buck. 🙂
Security is a good thing to consider – we use debit cards a lot but generally don’t use those for online transactions or at restaurants where we may lose sight of the card. It’s easier to contest a balance on a card than it is to try to get money put back into your account after someone has taken it out.
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Modern “cash” (bills and coins) is a holdover from when we had real, Constitutional money, i.e., gold & silver. The coins were gold, silver, nickel, or copper; and the bills were backed by precious metals. That was done away with, and now the “money supply” is managed by the Fed. So the whole idea of what a “dollar” is has completely changed.
Now that we are unburdened from the need to have physical money, credit cards make many transactions so much easier, and that’s why you and virtually everyone else now uses them for just about everything. Of course, the card itself is kind of an anachronism too. It used to be swiped on a machine which made a carbon copy of the raised numbers. Now the card holds a computer chip and is scanned electronically. And we order things online by just entering the number and the 3 digit code–you don’t even need the plastic card itself.
Circa 90 A.D., St. John the Revelator wrote that one day the “Antichrist” would cause “all” to have a “mark” (microchip?) on the hand or forehead, and no one could buy or sell without the “mark”. How did John know this was coming, 1,933 years ago?
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Yes, the Federal Reserve has done a pretty poor job of regulating the dollar, given that it would now cost over $30 to buy what $1 bought in 1913 (according to an online inflation calculator).
I occasionally think about that prediction in this context.
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Since Covid arrived, I rarely, if ever, use cash for anything. I can remember an errand-filled Saturday back when I still worked on site and my day would be filled with going from one specialty store to another … I’m talking about the Hallmark store, the nursery, the hardware store, drugstore for prescriptions for my mom, produce store and the grocery store. Now Meijer (where I believe you also shop) is one-stop shopping. All the errands are taken care of at one time and using the Meijer charge card to pay for it. And still I run out of time to get things done!!
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Meijer can be a time-saver for sure.
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It sure beats a day filled with errands.
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I still usually prefer paying cash because 0. I like being contrary and 1. It amuses me when the cashier gets a momentary deer in the headlights stare. 🙂
Also, I’ve noticed the past year some places, particularly restaurants, give you a cash discount.
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I have noticed the opposite, that cash discounts don’t seem to be as common as they once were.
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I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before grocery store self-checkout machines include the question, “Would you like to leave a tip?” But I digress (already…) Like USPS mail, I think cash and credit cards are on life support, thanks to the ever-trusting millennial generation and their digital ways. My father raised me with the advice of always carrying a $20 bill and a handkerchief, both of which have saved me numerous times. As long as there’s a reason for cash out there somewhere, I’ll always have $20.
My wife received a plea from a non-profit in the mail yesterday, with two nickels peeking through the cellophane where you’d normally see the recipient’s address (because then “you have two nickels to rub together”, I guess). Kind of like those marketing surveys where they include a dollar or two to guilt you into taking them. Cash in the mail? That’s kind of a statement about the value of currency. Finally, I do like the handheld payment machines you’re starting to see in restaurants, especially to reduce the chances of fraud with your credit card behind the scenes. I just don’t like the pressure of choosing a tip while the waitstaff stands right there in front of you.
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Dave, ditto the 20 dollar bill, but now it’s a 50 dollar bill, and no one will take it! They won’t believe it’s real! The 20 dollar bill has the purchasing power of near nothing today, but notice signs in stores saying they won’t take over a 20. Used to have a pal, that needed walking around money when he was on a freelance job, so in order to keep from carrying a huge wad, he’d carry 50’s…no one would take them, not cabs, not street vendors, not coffee shops, not nobody.
As an aside, I remember seeing an article in the NYT about city restaurants posting signs refusing to take cash, cards only; and the someone in authority threatening to sue because you shouldn’t be able to run a business and claim not to take the countries legal tender.
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Just about the only need for cash anymore is spur-of-the-moment tipping. Even tipping is moving to electronic means, which is a double-edged sword. It’s convenient because you don’t have to carry cash, but it’s more of an automatic reaction instead of an honest assessment of the service, creating today’s over-tipping culture. Maybe if we forced all tipping back to cash, we’d get the percentages back to reasonable.
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I always tip cash because it’s unlikely that the server will claim the tip as income. They have to claim the tip and pay taxes on it, if it’s included in the credit card charge. In restaurants they have this legal ridiculous wage that is different from the actual minimum wage, something like 3 bucks, and I hear all kinds of stories from my server pals about how restaurants fiddle the income so you can never even make the minimum “real” income, which is like 7-something. My local indie coffee shop pays something like 20 bucks an hour, but no one gets over about 20 hours a week, so they all have to have second jobs. They’ve all said they appreciate my cash tips, because they wouldn’t even be surviving without it.
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I had not thought about how a $50 (which buys what a $20 bought in 1988) is barely accepted anywhere. 1s, 5s and 10s are the modern version of pocket change.
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Oy, tipping after Covid – what a minefield! I never tipped for carryout but now feel guilty if I don’t. Yes, a tip at the grocery for self check out would be too much!
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We have to pay 8 cents for a bag if we don’t bring our own. That’s own reason I am often wearing an empty backpack. I remember well paycheck poker in the factory. We made a hand out of six numbers: the last four numbers of our check number and the last two numbers on your paycheck (cents). I use the cards for convenience but never stopped carrying the cash. You can’t give a credit card to a panhandler!
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Geoff, I try to always bring a sack with me, but they’re not charging for bags here yet. We have to option of paper or plastic, and if I forget my sack, I try to get paper, then I pile up my recyclables and take it all to the recycling bin, a rarity at apartments with private trash pickup, but my apartment owner is trying to do the right thing. My local high end grocery store has plastic bag recycling, and they take it to a company that processes them into park benches, so that’s a plus!
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At Paneras, I once asked for clarification on the three separate holes for trash, recycle, and food waste and I was told, “It doesn’t matter, it’s all going into the same trash bin.” Hard not to become a cynic!
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Geoff, I don’t know where you live, but the 4 years I lived in Indianapolis, I was horrified they didn’t have mandated residential recycling, and this was 2014-2018. Milwaukee had mandated residential recycling in 1991. In many areas of the country, if you have commercial trash pickup you have to pay for, which most businesses have, as opposed to city trash, then it’s possible that there is no recycling for commercial trash. It’s likely that your Panera has a contract in their area like this, but the store has a nationally set design that has multiple trash receptacles for areas of the country that do this. Don’t blame the store, it’s where you live. This was one of the regressive things that made I Indianapolis not a long term choice for me. Not to be political, but the regressive republicans that control everything there, probably think recycling is socialist. This is the kind of thing that highly educated tech people look at when they’re picking places to move to. BTW, my landlord tells me, if the residents at our place do not put the right trash in the right receptacle, then he gets fined by his commercial trash provider, and the whole load is trashed. Happens often because unfortunately, I am not living with the best and brightest! Cardboard pizza boxes with pizza goo in them is not a recyclable!
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I will be the counterpoint here – recycling as it is presently done in most places is likely a net waste of resources. Running double the truck miles, the costs of sorting and the limited uses for poorly sorted recyclables have made the process a hash, with the main benefit that it makes some feel virtuous.
Until the problem is resolved up front with deposits on containers or even the reduction in packaging, it will remain a really expensive way to accomplish not much.
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I live in the Seattle area. We are allowed to put the gooey pizza box in the yard waste. But I can’t get my own family members to remember what goes in each of the three bins. And if I spend time cleaning something potentially recyclable, I seem to be wasting a precious resource of water. It is all so discouraging.
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Geoff, in my city, we have single stream recycling. All recycling goes into the same bin, and it’s sorted when dumped at the recycling center on a production style line. Where it comes a cropper, is that apartments and businesses have to have private, commercial trash pickup, and they aren’t required to have any type of recycling, other than businesses need paper shedding and recycling. Most private trash businesses offer recycling anyway, because the larger systems here are set up for it.
J.P. Of course, is sort of correct about the recycling business overall, but, it’s dependent on where you live, and no excuse for Indianapolis not doing anything, especially to be this far behind everyone else.
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