Cash, We Don’t Need Any Stinking Cash
By Henry Meier
Here’s a banking paradox for you. If your credit union is like the Federal Reserve, you need to make sure that you have more currency on hand than ever before. Despite the explosion of debit cards and electronic banking, there is now more, not less, hard cash in circulation than there was 7 years ago. According to a thoughtful and readable essay ny the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (I swear you won’t have to get a second cup of coffee and translate economist-speak to get through it), the continued predominance of cash shows that its demise has been greatly exaggerated.
Oh really? Recently, the Meier family, replete with two children and our hyperactive German Shorthaired Pointer puppy and the family truckster, took a road trip from Albany, NY to Gettysburg, PA to Southern Pines, North Carolina and only needed to use cash twice. An explanation as to why shows that our good friends at the San Francisco Fed are whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the need for cash. We needed cash in order to tip our extremely informative guide who drove our family in said truckster all around the battlefields and provided expert analysis of the conflict. I don’t want to give away the ending. . .but the South lost. At the end of our two-hour journey, I tipped our guide and he wasn’t in a rush to give me a receipt for his services.
The second place we needed cash was for dinner at the Pik n Pig, which in addition to providing the best smoked pork I’ve ever had, is the type of place that North Carolinians take their Northern brethren to remind them that they are, in fact, in the South. As I sat down for my meal, I couldn’t help but think that I was late for the ZZ Top impersonation contest and by the end of the meal, my four year old was announcing that she wanted us to pass the kat-che-up and that she needed a ba-ath. This is a place that doesn’t accept plastic and when I looked at how reasonable the prices were, it’s going to take a long time to convince them that it is worth paying transaction fees in the hope of attracting new customers they don’t need.
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