WHERE CASH IS NO GOOD

My dad, a former Wall Street trader always advised me “cash is king” and to “hold on to it” when the economy gets tough.

But in the Netherlands, cash is definitely not getting the royal treatment. In so many places, it has simply ceased to be recognised as legal tender. More and more Dutch stores, from upscale health-food store Marqt to my local baker and bagel shop, take pin — or debit — cards exclusively. Some retailers even describe going cash-free as “cleaner” or “safer”. Tucking my debit card firmly away, I decide to see how far a bundle of cash will get me. Not far. The big-ticket items are strictly cashless affairs: my rent and my telephone bill among them.

I meet with baffled expressions and some resistance. “I can’t remember the last time we received a cash payment,” says Marielle Groentjes, an administrator with the company that manages my apartment, Hoen Property Management BV, and has worked there for a decade. “We don’t like cash in the office, we don’t have a safe, and banks charge you for depositing it.”

But it’s the smaller items that are giving me the biggest headaches. Not only can I not buy my organic produce at Marqt, but I am forced to wait in long cash-only lines at the supermarket while I watch those with debit cards quickly pay up and make it home for dinner. When I try to buy a tuna sandwich at Dutch bakery chain Vlaams Broodhuys, my cash is rejected. I can’t even use my euros to pay for parking in much of the city.

“Cash is a dinosaur, but it will stay,” says Michiel van Doeveren, a senior policy advisor at the Dutch central bank, DNB (De Nederlandsche Bank). But he points out it's the logistics that make handling cash expensive (it must be transported, guarded, tallied and registered) versus the ease of electronic payments. “It’s important that the electronic economy increases. We want to foster more efficient payments.”

Electronic payments in the Netherlands’ shops and supermarkets overtook cash payments for the first time in 2015 by a narrow margin: 50% debit cards while 49.5% were paid for in cash the remaining 0.5% were credit card-payments.

To read the complete article, see:
The Countries Where Cash Is On The Verge of Extinction (www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160922-the-countries-where-cash-is-on-the-verge-of-extinction)

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