>>>>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.

I don't think they're getting any float on the money. With credit card transaction fees around 3% and interest rates under 3% annually, I don't see how they could.