Shops Refusing Cash
The discussion
Grace: I think shops should be legally required to accept cash. My grandmother doesn't have a smartphone, and last month a café turned her away because they only took cards.
Hamid: I manage a bakery, and going cashless cut our closing time by forty minutes a day and ended the risk of robbery. Forcing us back to handling coins would be a real cost.
Ines: From an economics angle, cash also matters for resilience. When the card network went down across the city last year, cashless shops simply couldn't trade for six hours.
Grace: It isn't only outages. Cash lets people on tight budgets see exactly what they've spent, and children and people in debt recovery often rely on it.
Ines: I'd suggest a middle path: essential services like pharmacies, supermarkets and public transport must accept cash, while small businesses can choose. That protects vulnerable customers without burdening every café, and it keeps some cash circulating for emergencies.
Hamid: That outage hit us too, and we ended up giving bread away on trust, so I accept there's a resilience argument. Essential services only I could support, provided the definition is tight.
Grace: I'd prefer a universal rule, but protecting the essentials would solve my grandmother's problem most of the time.