>>>>>He got the swipe card right but folks have not given up completely on handwritten checks yet either.
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>>>>What really amazes me is how *all* of those people somehow plan it to do their grocery shopping in such a way as to be ahead of me in the checkout line ...
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>>>There still is a place for cheques.
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>>>A lot of small tradesmen will not be able to take a card and people paying may not want to have that much cash to pay. Especially elderly people (like you :-)) . They may not want to have to carry around cash. My wife works as a therapist and is often paid by cheque and I know a lot of her clients wouldn't want to be walking around with nearly £100 cash in their pocket.
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>>Exactly why banks have debit cards as well as credit cards. Every supermarket, drugstore, gas station takes them. Goes directly out of the checking account.
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>>There is some resistance to credit card fees on the part of small businesses, I grant you, but a lot of them are moving to credit and debit cards to get the money faster. One of my clients is a parking lot management company and we've moved steadily to credit card paystations for transient parking and email invoices with cc payments on a website for monthly parking. The float on the money ( and not having to keep large cash amounts in parking lots ) pays for it.
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>But what about the sort of small trader providing a service in someones house. Or the sort of therapists who works from home etc.
>There's a level of transaction which is below the small business but still larger than a few pence.

Drug dealers still take cash <s> (though at the wholesale level wire transfers are more common ) High end hookers have found the virtues of LLCs that take credit cards and show up as something that looks like a legitimate business tax deduction.