While stepping up to buy tickets at the cinema on Friday evening, I had a moment of panic. As I shuffled to the front of the line, two signs glared at me: one declared the venue was cash-free, the other that card payment terminals were down. Comedic in retrospect, a dilemma at the moment.
Over the past decade, cash – and cash use – has been dwindling. At the end of the 2022-23 financial year, the total value of cash in circulationto $101.3 billion – the smallest amount since November 2019. And cash usage has plunged from about one-third of transactions in 2019 to just 16 per cent in 2022. At the same time, many venues are switching to “cashless” trading., up from 63 per cent in 2019.
In our drive for efficiency and scale, we’ve sometimes trampled over the value of having multiple competing options. That’s not just in terms of payment options but also when it comes to companies – especially with the rise of the tech giants.There are benefits to putting our goods and services into the hands of a few big players. It can lead to economies of scale: cost savings from those companies spreading their production costs across a bigger output.