When buying things at a store or paying at a restaurant, I often feel like I'm the last person paying with cash. This is not an indictment on people depending too much on credit card, since debit card often often used, but rather how much cash is quickly going of of fashion.
Now, this shouldn't be too much of a problem to me, coming from someone so technologically inclined. I don't even bother with the potential privacy implications. No, my main gripe is that the current payment infrastructure with cards, let alone cellphones, suck. Unless you're stuck with a slow cashier that slowly counts change down to the cent, paying with cash still remains a pretty fast transaction. But those card readers are just way too slow. Many use modem connections (really), require some kind of password, and the data transfer time easily exceeds 45 seconds on busy days, let alone the paper printing.
What surprise me is how much point-of-sales systems, if we exclude ones in California running Square on an iPad, are still using end-of-90s technology. Actually, back in the 90s, they were using early 80s technology. Nowadays we could have PayPal transactions over the internet using 3G faster than paying with a debit card with a chip. Oh well, maybe in a decade we'll have payment systems that don't suck that much.
Published on December 22, 2012 at 21:35 EST
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