[newheart]

"It’s no more social engineering than any other bandwagon advertising. The underlying message of all that kind of advertising, which is a high percentage of all advertising, is “be one of the cool kids, use our stuff”."

True. And I actually work in advertising. Underlying almost all of it is the premise that people need to be persuaded of even things that are good for them. So maybe it is all a form a social engineering. There is just something about trying to usher in a cashless world that makes me a tad bit paranoid.

[discostu]

Businesses hate cash, from the position of a retail outlet cash is just a nightmare. Between misfeasance and malfeasance it’s a pain in the butt: people miscount it, it winds up being counted multiple times which costs man power, employees steal it, it atracts thieves, plus there’s the disease factor (absorbant paper that spends most of its time in warm moist pockets and occasionally gets sneezed on... really cash is kind of gross). Pretty much everybody in the retail world that doesn’t get tips dreams of the day physical money winds up on the ashheap of history.