Swanage Railway to go cashless

[yoyothehobo]

At the last open forum it was said that 90% of all transactions was card/contactless. The railway may loose a little bit of money short term, but longer term it will probably save money on cash handling.

Was that value or number of transactions or was it not specified?

 

[Titfield]

I wonder if this is in anyway related to the redundancies Swanage Railway have been talking about?

Perhaps staff and volunteer time is having to be used as efficiently as possible so by not accepting cash they are reducing the staff time needed to make up floats, check daily takings etc etc.

 

[Llanigraham]

As regards the elderly, the elderly are now people like my parents who've been using cards all their life and are often relatively tech savvy too, at least to the extent of being able to book something online. The elderly of 20 years ago - the ones who spent most of their lives using only cash - such as my grandparents - are sadly now passing away if they haven't already (all mine have now).

Most Boomers use cards. And the Boomers are today's elderly - and it won't be that long before early Gen Xers fit into that bracket.

Exactly!!

I live in a small town in Mid Wales where the predominant population is over 55, and which has no banks, just a Post Office and one building society in a solicitors office. This morning I had coffee with a friend (older than me) and off the 20 or so people there only ONE paid cash, every one else paid with a card or their phone. I know that the vast majority of them were pensioners. So I'm sorry but those suggesting that the older generation aren't au-fai with the cashless society really are talking rubbish.

If we want to go to an actual bank we now need to travel to the nearest town, a round trip of 36 miles, and make an appointemt if we want to talk to someone from Barclays, who are only in their "office" and not an actual bank on 3 days a week, and they will not accept money in any form at that office, or we have to travel even further to reach a "Banking Hub", but only on the relevant day that the bank we wish to speak to attends there.

One of the local cafes accepts all methods of payment (even barter!!) but says that it costs her more to pay cash into the bank than it does to pay the small percentage on her credit card machine, PLUS her insurance is cheaper because she doesn't hold cash at the premises.

Well, when cash has gone completely, the banks will have more control over an accounts money. No one will be able to say ”I’d like to withdraw all my money please”. There won’t be any physical bank structures left to enter.
The Canadian trucker protest proved how authorities did shut down access to bank accounts to those who supported the protest. That happened, wasn’t a conspiracy.

In many parts of the UK that is already true!
(see my comments above)

 

[Baxenden Bank]

Unfortunately the use of cash is far more complex than people realise. At my railway I've gone through £500 in £1 coins making £60 odd cash sales in teas and coffees before despite continually asking people if they've got anything smaller. The problem is that everybody gets £20 notes from ATMs and then expects the retailer to offer them the service of breaking it down in to small transactions.
With advance bookings and card payments we no longer get sufficient cash to be self sufficient in change and small transactions stuff like teas, coffees ice creams requires constant trapses to the bank. I can quite understand why the Swanage is going cashless if it has no commercial bank left in the town.

Do you have an amusement arcade nearby? They must have 'machine fulls' of £1 coins, even if they need to also keep a large float for people coming in with notes and wanting change. I know, slot/gaming/amusement with (no) prizes machines are going card only too!

 

[nanstallon]

Dinosaurs of the world unite! A cashless society means that not only does the government know what you are doing and buying, but also that it (or the banks) can completely cut you out of life - no way of buying anything if it cancels your card at the flick of a computer keyboard.

 

[NorthWestRover]

A cashless society means that not only does the government know what you are doing and buying,

Is that before or after Bill Gates injects a microchip into you? Presumably shot from a grassy knoll..

 

[Darandio]

Is that before or after Bill Gates injects a microchip into you? Presumably shot from a grassy knoll..

Surely that wouldn't work? They'd be completely enveloped in tin foil.

 

[Meerkat]

Some student residences over here also use an app instead of a door key - what could possibly go wrong?

So you get mugged they can steal all your stuff at home as well as from your pockets!

 

[nanstallon]

Is that before or after Bill Gates injects a microchip into you? Presumably shot from a grassy knoll..

Perhaps we shall all have a barcode imprinted on our foreheads, so we just bow to the card reader. Truly the mark of the Beast.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

All the anti-conspiracy theorists of the world unite. There is no evil in the world, everyone is nice, no-one has improper motives for pushing anythng, ever.

Just like those people in Logan's Run, all happy, serene, joyful, even when 'the computer' decides it's time for you to 'regenerate', except no-one ever got regenerated, strange that.

Anyway, as we have descended into the usual cashless society debate, I offer you this article (not paywalled) from The Telegraph yesterday:

We must keep using cash – if only to stop the banks snooping on us

Wherever we turn, people, institutions and governments want to know our personal details – it has to end

William Sitwell 3 March 2024 • 10:00am

Announcing a new exhibition on the future of money this week (who could resist a journey through the history of payment systems?), the Bank of England released news that the total value of notes in circulation is up nearly 16 per cent.

Jennifer Adam, the curator of the Bank of England Museum, said: “For all that many people are using more digital payments, many people may be using cash as a means to manage their day-to-day spending.” And she added: “It’s much easier to keep track of your finances if you’re physically handing over cash in shops.”

Officials at the bank also attribute this spike in cash to “the turmoil caused by the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis”. Which I’m sure is true. But there’s another reason. We’re sick of Big Brother, the state via its tentacles of officialdom grabbing our data. But it’s not just Big Brother. There’s Little Brother and Baby Brother and every other Motherf***er Brother stalking us at every turn demanding our data.

Councils – apparently going bust up and down the country – are less interested in collecting bins than data. Phone the bank and before they even have the chance to say: “No you can’t have a poxy £500 overdraft”, you must hand over your email, phone number, date of birth, address, postcode and mother’s maiden name. And, of course, you need to do that more than once during the course of the call, an endless interrogation, first by robots, then humans. “But I’ve already told the robot my mother’s maiden name,” met with zero sympathy. You must reveal it again.

And such bots and such humans have no old-school courtesy. Don’t they know it’s rude to ask a lady her age? Not when you’ve laboured for 30 minutes to get through to someone to ask if they’ve dispatched your new debit card.

A friend recently staying near Ripon in North Yorkshire decided it might be nice to visit Fountains Abbey. As well as the ancient abbey, there was the appeal of the water gardens and the spring snowdrops. But, the fools, when they arrived it was made clear that the fee to gain entry was nearly equivalent to a year’s membership so, considering future family days out, repaired to an office to sign up for 12 months of National Trust roaming.

Except they couldn’t just pay some money and give a name. The office demanded an address, an email, a date of birth and two telephone numbers. And, ironically, the form one has to fill in attempts to reassure you that “your privacy is important to us”. What they actually mean is “your data is important to us”.

My pal, sensing a family riot if he didn’t acquiesce, handed over his personal details but then felt soiled, even as he contemplated the vaulted ceilings, grand columns and vast tower of the Abbey ruins.

Wherever we turn, people, institutions and governments want our data. The Chinese insist upon it when we sign up to TikTok, the water companies want it when you call them up to say you’ve got a leaky pipe.

Thus we revert to cash, to stop the Brothers from following our every move (“We note you bought of copy of the Daily Mail yesterday, before hiring a Santander bicycle from Chelsea to Paddington, purchasing a return ticket to the West Country during which train ride you bought a black coffee and an item of ‘confectionary’ – perhaps you’d be so kind as to elucidate on that, based on your previous spending habits we suggest it was a chocolate brownie – bought a set of Muji pens on Amazon and then at Exeter took a taxi, mileage, based on the fare, around 11 miles, but destination as yet unknown.”).

And when we use that cash we feel guilty. I often find myself these days asking: “Is cash OK?”. Like I’m Ronnie Biggs, on the run from the boys in blue. “Hiding a little from the tax man are we?” we imagine the shopkeeper saying.

But the resurgence of cash is to those of us data fugitives a reassuring message that we are not alone. The first Facebook generation soon realised it was an error placing photos of themselves getting sloshed on a public form so that future bosses could check the veracity of their claim to love nothing more than a quiet night in front of the telly. Now perhaps Millennials will begin to see that having a bank watch their every move makes the convenience of buying everything on a phone a little less attractive.

I think I’ll swing by the Bank of England and take a look at this exhibition. Surely that’s one place where they have to accept cash.

My bold.

 

[Cowley]

Yep. We think that’ll probably do for now as we have done this subject a number of times before. If you desperately want it reopened then cheques can be made payable to…