A nearby Coles had 6 cash & card checkouts and 4 card only checkouts.
They have now converted 2 cash & card units to card only.
Coles & Woollies have obviously made some serious decisions regarding the future of cash.
If cash was fauna, its Conservation Status would probably be Extremely Vulnerable.
An article regarding another global outage of websites.
It will be interesting to see if it is another hacking attack.
Hanlonâs Razor? I suspect stuff up, rather than hacking.
I would agree we are being âsocially engineered.â People forget (or worse, ignore) the fact that the cheapest price is always between buyer and seller. If you let a third party into your transaction - such as a card payment - then of course that party wants a commission from both buyer and seller, forcing up the price of the transaction for both original parties. And as already been mentioned, should a merchant have a power outage, then cash is still king. I recall reading about the fires on the South Coast of NSW when people trying to escape were queuing up for fuel at a service station. As I understand it, the fires had burnt the radio/internet relay stations so while the servo had power, POS and ATMs were down. Sales were, you guessed it - cash only. Lots of frustration that day! As a postscript, the internet was repaired fairly rapidly, but TV and radio services were only partly restored and in the the case of the ABC, it took months before Radio National was back to full power. Says something about our priorities doesnât it.
But assuming a conspiracy is much more fun than boring old incompetence.
Our physio had signs in the waiting area stating that EFTPOS was their preferred method of payment.
They recently added additional signs stating that as of 01.07.2021, they will no longer accept cash.
It appears that cash will be going the way of the dinosaurs.
Last week, on Thursday 17 June 2021 I think (doesnât really matter), there was yet another failure of internet banking, ATMs etcâŠalong with a whole series of other essential services worldwide, that we have been forced to adopt with the great new technology. A global system that is basically very vulnerable from the simplest of attacks, human, AI or otherwise.
These failures, or âoutagesâ seem to be becoming more frequent. Are we on top of this situation, or is technology controlling us? Hmmmmm.
An example of the drive to Card âconvenienceâ is that everywhere before The Virus, âTap and Goâ transactions were $100 now at Costco and others that supposedly hard limit has been raised substantially to the point it rivals our weekly grocery spend
I recall as a child that my parents needed to get a letter from the local bank branch when travelling interstate, in order to be able to access their money at another branch of the same bank!
Smith is constantly being misinterpreted. He did not believe in a totally âfreeâ market, or that companies could be trusted to do âthe right thingâ. Modern extremist economic ideologies owe very little to Adam Smith, and more to people like Hayek and nutjobs such as Ayn Rand.
I was worried you might be discussing ShemWarehouse for a moment. (Some writers have referred to it as a âchemâ.) How much does it cost to get the words that go into a golemâs head?
I wasnât aware that having a large amount of cash on oneâs person was unlawful. Why does this sound like police are assuming guilt unless innocence is proven? Where is the follow-up story either clearing the couple or naming their alleged crime? (A quick online search for the story implies that it was based upon a Queensland Police Service press release.) No indication of any follow-up, or that any crime has been committed.
That is an ongoing problem with the media, particularly in this era of declining media resources (so that the media is more reliant on canned content put out by PR flunkies and less able to verify or follow up). There is often no follow-up. The original story often has more prominence than any follow-up. Clearly this has the potential to malign an individual unfairly.
Like you, I donât know the truth of this story.
Tassie had an outage because of construction cutting its trunks, but an equipment failure was responsible for 3 days of downtime. A minor inconvenience? The impacts were pervasive.
Those around Lennox Heads in NSW also are without cashless transactions and all transactions need to be in cash. Cashless society needs very robust connectivity that is able to overcome minor 
inconvenience such as cut cables or power outages. There is still an obvious need for cash in hand it would seem.
Assuming when and if one can get to what is essential. Best to have a plentiful supply of smaller notes and gold coins in the stash. Retailers are unlikely to have large reserves of small change. At least until there is an open bank, if there is one to hand?
The proponents of everything digital, online, cashless, paperless etc are just short sighted. Whenever there is a big inconvenience such as these short term catastrophes (I am certainly not trivialising this), reality sets in. When, not if, but when there is a major and long term failure we will see the results of the worldâs desire to adopt this technology, regardless of the consequences. There are very few, if any safeguards which will not result in chaos. Itâs very easy to shrug this off as most people donât look further than the end of their nose.
It has been a while since a publicised failure, but.
I have not heard more about replacing cash in recent months. 
I would be interested to know where one stands if an establishment states that it only accepts cashless transactions. On a recent visit to England, there are quite a few restaurants and pubs that are âcashlessâ. Two venues I visited said the same thing, when questioned about the legality, which were: If a customer has dinner, or a drink and insists on paying cash, the correct amount and walks out, there is nothing the venue can do, because itâs legal tender. Iâm not sure how this could be challenged, here in Australia, however it begs the question.
One other incident that occurred the other day, where I work, was the failure of the card device, due to the connection. This is common everywhere, and when it happens, the flow on effect can be very time consuming and costly. Until there is a far more reliable service, I think a cashless society will be many years away.
Ray
While not a generalised start in this other topic, it discusses (and links therein answer it for Australia).
Basically an Australian business can accept or decline any payment type it wants, including cash.
Yes! If ever, or in our great great grandchildrenâs lifetimes.
I wonât go on any more after this question/scenario, as I understand the fact that a business can demand a certain type of payment. However, even if they make it clear that cash is not welcome and the service (dinner, drinks for example) is provided, when paying, if the exact cash is provided (with another staff member witnessing) and the customer walks, I wonder how this would play out in a court of law. Anyway, just a scenario, but probably will happen many times in the future. The failure of the electronic payment, due to an outage is another discussion.
Ray
Or indeed if excess cash is provided.
Iâm not a lawyer but it is unlikely that the businessâs specific terms and conditions can be enforced by a court unless you signed a contract. If they stop you on the way in and tell you that itâs card-only and make you agree to that as a condition of entry, you might be taken to have âsignedâ a contract. Even then the condition would have to be âreasonableâ. If thereâs a small, discreet notification somewhere obscure that you might not have noticed, their case gets weaker.
During the pandemic, a business might have âreasonablyâ decided not to handle cash, as that is an identifiable risk both to their staff and to any other customer who gets change.
During the pandemic, my local servo went card-only (and I was previously in the habit of paying cash) but I notice that those signs have now disappeared. For those businesses that are looking to reduce their handling of cash, for whatever reason, the pandemic has been good news (from that limited perspective).
I would think that if you offered to pay a business in cash, that would accepted despite that business not wanting to deal with cash.
Of course you as a cash payer need to be reasonable. Offering up a $100 note for a cup of coffee may be met with a problem in providing change.
