Leave it to the Danes to Kill Cash

Denmark has taken a huge step forward to becoming a cashless society after the Danish Chamber of Commerce recommended that certain retailers be allowed to ban good old-fashioned cash so that certain retailers would only accept payments via smartphones, debit and credit cards.

If this new measure gets approved by the Danish Parliament, clothing retailers, gas stations and restaurants would be able to ban cash from January 2016.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that being stuck behind someone paying by card or cheque in a busy queue at a supermarket would guarantee shopper rage, but times have changed as more and more people find the concept of paying for goods with notes and coins quite primitive.

Nearly a third of forward thinking Danish citizens have already embraced Danske Bank’s official app, MobilePay, to happily pay for most everyday items and are not expecting much opposition from the new measure.

On the surface this would solve many so called first world problems such as sneaking into your bedroom at 3am only for a pocket of loose change to come tumbling out of your jeans pockets and alerting the entire household of your sneaky behaviour, not to mention the removal of administrative and financial burdens such as security firms to take the cash to the bank that staff have not already skimmed from the tills.

However, there are equally as many people that feel this latest measure has slightly sinister undertones whilst dressed up as a convenience to the average Joe that will just end leaving them with fewer rights than citizen’s of third world countries.

If the future consists of the complete disappearance of physical notes and coins, there would no longer be the need for a current account in the traditional sense and money would come from a central bank rather than from depositors some theorists have warned.

Assuming all money eventually existed only in bank accounts rather than mattresses, there would no longer be any way to do anything off the radar where every transaction would be monitored or directly controlled by a government and would certainly be much easier to encourage people to spend or cutback by creating a virtual tap of sorts to control the masses.

There are an estimated 9 million Americans who do not have a bank account and are quite happy living off the radar without the CIA, NSA or FBI monitoring their every transaction because they are aware that everything they purchase is recorded and essentially builds a profile of them that could be potentially used against them, but are we not tracked by our phones anyway?

If taken to extremes, some have even suggested that authorities in control would have the tools to monitor the spending patterns of customers and limit how much they spend to excess on products like gambling, cigarettes, alcohol or fatty products, but is this Orwellian future just people reporting a worst case scenario as fact?

With forgery, robberies, tax evasion and illegal transactions becoming a thing of the past, would life really be so bad without dirty physical cash?

Despite all the warnings of the impending big brother society that will be thrust upon us by the tin foil hat brigade, as a man that lives by the rules and wants to make life as easy as possible, I have already stopped using cash for most transactions and actually find I spend less money than I would if I have a spare twenty in my wallet, in fact, stop right there, I don’t even have a wallet.

Of course the biggest champion of the cashless society would be the  tax man who will finally be able to see every aspect of your finances but still cannot help but think that if you have nothing to hide, you have little to worry about, but equally as the old T-shirt used to say “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you."

I am typically optimistic by nature and as an advocate of how technology can actually help us, I am probably guilty of not looking into every angle of a situation before throwing away physical media, wallets and cable subscriptions with wild abandon, but is this such a bad thing?

Whatever your thoughts on this thorny issue, you cannot help but feel this is just the tip of the iceberg and although we are only talking about a concept being considered by the people of Denmark now, it can only be a matter of time before we all reside in a cashless society.

After taking a step back and looking at all sides of the argument, I can see the pros and cons of a cashless world, but equally the benefits of both cash or card payment methods and it's this choice that makes us free rather than an all-or-nothing alternative.

Would you celebrate the demise of cash or does the very idea fill you with dread? I am genuinely interested in everyone’s unique thought process on this subject that will eventually affect each and every one of us.

Let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

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Thanks for reading. You can find my previous LinkedIn articles here and you can also connect on Twitter at @neilchughes or contact me via my site Technology Blog Writer where I help businesses with company blogs.

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