“We don’t take cash,” the cashier said politely.
I nodded. I’ve worked in restaurants, and I understand the argument. With employees, cash can be seen as a liability, with risks of theft, accounting errors, and end-of-day discrepancies. Cards feel cleaner, easier, and more trackable. Still, something in me tightened. Every time we stop accepting cash, we normalize a world where every transaction is recorded, categorized, stored, and potentially scrutinized. Every purchase becomes a data point. Every cup of coffee leaves a digital trail.
I took my coffee, found my seat at the bookstore, and started signing books. Between conversations, I could hear the sizzle and chatter from a nearby empanada booth at the farmers market. The smell of warm pastry finally got me. I walked over, cash already in hand.
“Can I get a potato empanada?” I asked.
The woman at the booth said, with an apologetic smile, “We don’t take cash.”
Not a brick-and-mortar store with layers of management, a pop-up tent at a farmers market. That’s when it really hit me. This isn’t just about convenience or speed at checkout. Cash itself is becoming strange, inconvenient, outdated, and almost suspicious. We’re being trained to accept that every exchange must be mediated, approved, and recorded by a third party, and that third party isn’t free.
Most of the vendors there were using Square to process payments. The typical fee is about 3 percent to 4 percent per transaction. That might not sound like much, but that percentage is shaved off every single time money changes hands digitally.
If I hand $20 in cash to the empanada vendor, and he hands that same $20 to the barber who cuts his hair, and the barber gives it to a babysitter, and the babysitter uses it to buy a pizza, that same $20 bill keeps moving through the community at full value. No one skims anything off the top.
But in the digital system, that cut happens again and again, and the effect compounds. At a 3.5 percent fee, after one transaction, that $20 becomes $19.30. After two, $18.62. After three, $17.97. After four, $17.34. After five digital transactions, only about $16.74 remains in circulation. More than $3 of the original $20 has quietly disappeared in just a handful of everyday exchanges. That money didn’t go to the farmer, the barber, the babysitter, or the pizza shop. It left the community entirely.
Every digital transaction comes with processing fees and interchange costs. Small businesses quietly lose a percentage of every sale, and customers pay more over time as those costs are baked into prices. In return, we give up privacy, independence, and the simple resilience of being able to transact even when systems go down. Cash works during power outages. Cash works when the internet is down. Cash works without a corporate intermediary. Cash is anonymous, direct, and final.
When everything becomes digital, spending can be tracked, restricted, frozen, or flagged. We may not feel that pressure today when we’re buying coffee and pastries in beautiful spaces, but systems built for convenience can easily become systems of control.
