What's the advantage of cash?

Cash has certainly taken a lot of hits over the years. From the advent of credit and debit cards to mobile payments, there have been many challengers to the medium. In addition, COVID-19 caused many people to abandon cash in fear of "dirty" banknotes. But despite all of that, cash remains a popular payment method around the world. But the question is: Why is this? What are the advantages of cash?

It's fast

Out of all the payment methods, cash is a fairly fast way to pay. With an EMV enabled card, the point-of-sale system can take a while to process the payment, and the user still has to enter their PIN. And if the card isn't inserted fully or is removed before the payment fully processes, this will slow it down even more.

With cash, the customer simply has to count out the banknotes they need, hand it to the employee or insert into the self-checkout kiosk and the process is fairly seamless.

And even though mobile payments is also a fast way to pay, not every merchant accepts mobile pay and spotty data connections can affect the payment.

It's easy to budget

With credit cards or mobile wallets, it can be very easy to overspend. We have all swiped that card for an expensive purchase that we probably should have waited or saved for.

With cash, it's much easier to budget, since you have a certain amount of physical notes that you can use for purchases. If you don't have the cash on you, you don't make the purchase.

For those with small children, this makes cash an excellent teaching tool as well to show them how to properly count, manage and spend money. It's far easier for children to understand money when it's a physical object they can hold in their hands rather than numbers on a screen.

Cash is also ideal for smaller purchases since vendors do not have to deal with fees on cash payments unlike with card payments.

It's private

This one should be obvious, but with any card payments, there is a paper trail. With cash, it's completely private. As to why you are making a private purchase, I'm not here to judge that. It's up to you how private you want your purchases to be.

For these reasons and more, I think cash will be relevant for many years to come. Are there other benefits of cash you'd like to highlight? Click here to contact us to share!