You’ve been there. You’ve done your grocery shopping – which is stressful enough by itself – and waited at the end of an interminably long checkout queue, and you finally – finally! – get your groceries loaded onto the conveyor belt, ready for the checkout process to begin so you can move on to the important things in your life, and the guy in front of you, getting ready to pay, pulls out a…checkbook! *cue soundtrack from Psycho shower scene*
You know that guy, the inconsiderate relic whose car probably has hand-carved rock wheels? Yeah, I’m that guy.
Who writes checks anymore, anyway? Besides me, not very many people, according to this article, which cites a Federal Reserve study showing that the number of transactions conducted via written check decreased by more than 50% between 2000 and 2012. (There are still billions of checks written each year, but most of them are mine, apparently.) People are instead using debit and credit cards, with a few – most likely Tea Partiers or Preppers – resorting to cash. Interestingly, the value of cash transactions still exceeds that of either debit or credit cards, which makes sense if you assume that really big payments – like those for house down payments – exceed most credit card limits.
Anyway, I’m old school enough that I don’t have a debit card…never have, probably never will. I’ve also never gotten comfortable buying groceries with a credit card…and I’m not prepared to offer any logical explanation whatsoever for that bias; it’s just how I roll. I can say it’s not because I’m averse to credit cards in general. Our credit card bill represents the largest single expenditure by far we have in any given month, although we always pay it in full, but I guess I grew up thinking that people who bought groceries on credit just weren’t good money managers. Like I said, no supportable logic. In fact, the cash back programs that most credit card companies provide justify putting everything on a card, assuming you can pay off the balance each month.
But, lest you think I’m a hopeless dinosaur, I can’t wait for the day that we can conduct all of our business via PayPal or by using NFC capabilities on our phones. How are these things different, conceptually, from debit cards? I don’t know, but the fewer things I have to carry around in order to give someone my money, the better. (The phone-payment thing – like the system Starbucks uses [which I do love, by the way] – doesn’t qualify because the phone isn’t the key to the transaction; it’s just the facilitator.)
In fact, in a perfect world, grocery checkout would involve rolling a cart full of items directly from the aisle to your car without even pausing at a payment terminal because an NFC reader at the door would instantly read, price, and debit your bank account for your purchases.
It’s worth mentioning, if only to protect her if you ever get behind us in a grocery line, that Debbie isn’t onboard with my preference for checks. As with most things in our marriage, she’s simply humoring me [and since we never had teenagers, I rely on her for my required allotment of eye-rolling].