Saying "No" to Plastic?

How did we ever live without ATM cards? I was thinking about this during the week. One of my memories of childhood was when Mum's local building society was bought out by a bank. Our regular routine had been to visit the tidy, sterile and efficient building society, and now we were subject to the utter boredom of having absolutely nothing to do while stuck in a large and dirty bank branch, a shabby old place with threadbare carpet, completely devoid of any kind of personality apart from "horrible". Each week my mother queued for teller service, to hand over her passbook and withdraw her cash, and the "progress" of having to change banks meant that the passbook was no longer fed into a machine to be printed - the bank teller now used a pen to write the transaction out by hand. My mother observed this backward step and got merely an apology that the bank system couldn't cope with the newer building society computer system...

Look at that queue! The smile is a lie.

Bank Branches. Blech. Give me an ATM any day. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that having to actually step inside a bank is as alien as a rotary phone, or using a fax machine. I mean, what for, unless it's to remind ourselves that this is how we used to suffer?

So it was with interest that I read Brigid Delaney's piece in The Guardian recently, where she admitted to intentionally not replacing a lost ATM card, and instead forced herself to operate only by cash. While I lived in Finland I often withdrew cash and used it instead of my ATM card. I found cash somehow tactile, since I was not looking after bills and payments myself, and it gave me some kind of attachment to the financial world, even if very limited. It also meant that I knew how much money I had. When you have limited income, the feel of notes and coins, the physical sight of it dwindling as you hand it over for goods, all keeps it very real in terms of tracking your spending. One of my workmates does the same. Her debt burden is high, so she does the maths on every payday, keeping all her bill money in the bank and withdrawing the leftovers as cash. Once the cash is gone, it's gone - there is nothing left for her to spend.

But given that it's still possible to spend every scrap even when you're working in cash, is there a point? Maybe. I personally think that the contactless trend is insidious. Paying for things has become so easy that we barely think about what we're doing. Think about it next time you pay - the focus is on waiting to hear that beep, at which point we pull the card away and consider the deal finished. We barely think about the amount, or that we've just paid for something, at all.

These little purchases, for a chocolate bar, for the bus ticket, for lunch, all small snippets which can add up to a tremendous amount of moolah in a very rapid way. Think how many people you know claim to be hard up for cash and still flash that beepy little card all the time - but it's not hypocrisy. The purchases are no longer tangible. People are simply not connecting "many small purchases add up to a big total". It's a spending avalanche, like in the cartoons when you were a kid and you'd see a snowball becoming bigger as it rolled down a hill. The little things matter, folks. They make all the difference.