>>>>>>>He got the swipe card right but folks have not given up completely on handwritten checks yet either.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>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 ...
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>There still is a place for cheques.
>>>>>
>>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>>
>>>
>>>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.
>
>Hmmm. Not all small traders are involved in vice Charles. Must be the circles you move in. Whats an LLC BTW

Limited Liability Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company

It's also the LLC small businesses that report their business income on their personal income returns and fall into that niche of 200,000-250,000/yr income (sometimes after combining spousal income as well) and tax increases about to happen here (when the tax cuts end).