ForeverAddickted said:

Just been down to Asda to pick up some dinner tonight for me and my Son

As I've gone to pay with my Bank Card, their checkouts have gone down, meaning they can only pay with Cash... Seems like it was a nationwide thing, going by one cashier who'd just got off the phone with a Manager - Don't think cash should ever disappear whilst there are always minor issues like that.

That's shocking FA, I thought everyone just nicked it nowadays.

iaitch said:

ForeverAddickted said:

Just been down to Asda to pick up some dinner tonight for me and my Son

As I've gone to pay with my Bank Card, their checkouts have gone down, meaning they can only pay with Cash... Seems like it was a nationwide thing, going by one cashier who'd just got off the phone with a Manager - Don't think cash should ever disappear whilst there are always minor issues like that.

That's shocking FA, I thought everyone just nicked it nowadays.

I had the Security Guard next to me trying to pay for his lunch at the same time

Lincsaddick said:

Tesco bans cash transactions at 40 venues across UK in huge change for shoppers (msn.com)

"Tesco claims the change has improved the customer experience".  Because not being able to choose is always better, isn't it?

cantersaddick said:

Chizz said:

One in five shop purchases now made in cash 

Cash use in the shops rose for a second year in a row after a decade of falls, according to retailers.

Notes and coins were used in a fifth of transactions last year, the British Retail Consortium said, as shoppers found cash helped them to budget better. 

Article. 

Surprised its that high. I reckon its pretty skewed across the country and in London its more like 1 in 15.

Central London perhaps - Greater London would be similar to the national figures I would guess.

See the thread on power outages in Portugal and Spain to learn why cashless is a bad idea... (I was in the UK luckily).  

Oggy Red said:

ForeverAddickted said:

Just been down to Asda to pick up some dinner tonight for me and my Son

As I've gone to pay with my Bank Card, their checkouts have gone down, meaning they can only pay with Cash... Seems like it was a nationwide thing, going by one cashier who'd just got off the phone with a Manager - Don't think cash should ever disappear whilst there are always minor issues like that.

Makes you realise the fragility and our dependence on technology.

As a society we seem to be sleepwalking into a scenario where one day banks, corporations and authorities can control our access to our own finances.

They always did didn't they? Unless you are talking about the days when you got cash in a pay packet and kept savings under the matress and paid rent in cash.

Carter said:

I've had a bank fuck up and "misplace" a few thousand pounds of my money. This was only recently an its made me feel like keeping my money in a box buried underground or in a safe in my house. Their attitude to fixing their balls up was atrocious too. 

Their approach to retail banking is also ensuring that will soon vanish. They are only concerned with selling over-priced financial products as opposed to helping people manage their money. My mate helps his dad with this stuff and his dad had something like £50k in a current account and all the arseholes did when he took his dad down there to move most of it into a savings account was be obstructive and attempt to sell mortgages with shite rates, credit cards this guy plainly didn’t need before telling my pal they would only issue the money in installments over 2 weeks, asking him to take it out in £5k lumps, walk it along to the other bank his dad had opened a savings account in and deposit the cash in there. Absolutely no reason they couldn't have transferred it via BACS immediately. 

Move bank, I work in around financial services, and it stuns me everyday that people don't leave the main high street institutions 

Rothko said:

Carter said:

I've had a bank fuck up and "misplace" a few thousand pounds of my money. This was only recently an its made me feel like keeping my money in a box buried underground or in a safe in my house. Their attitude to fixing their balls up was atrocious too. 

Their approach to retail banking is also ensuring that will soon vanish. They are only concerned with selling over-priced financial products as opposed to helping people manage their money. My mate helps his dad with this stuff and his dad had something like £50k in a current account and all the arseholes did when he took his dad down there to move most of it into a savings account was be obstructive and attempt to sell mortgages with shite rates, credit cards this guy plainly didn’t need before telling my pal they would only issue the money in installments over 2 weeks, asking him to take it out in £5k lumps, walk it along to the other bank his dad had opened a savings account in and deposit the cash in there. Absolutely no reason they couldn't have transferred it via BACS immediately. 

Move bank, I work in around financial services, and it stuns me everyday that people don't leave the main high street institutions 

Ha! Herein lies the irony 

Because of another massive fuck up they had made, I had indeed binned them off and gone to First Direct. It was like putting glasses on for the first time seeing how things should be done. People, humans answer the phone, quickly. The app just works, they are transparent. This happened as I was closing all my accounts with the well known 3 letter high street sack of excrement. And I make you right, for someone who pays attention to where my money is and I know every penny that's in my account and what its there for, I should have sacked them off years ago. One good thing is the amount of stupid goodwill payments they have had to give me over the last couple of months has nigh on paid for my holiday. 

Algarveaddick said:

Radostanradical said:

Algarveaddick said:

See the thread on power outages in Portugal and Spain to learn why cashless is a bad idea... (I was in the UK luckily).  

Not sure a once in a life time incident, which was resolved in less than 24 hours, would be enough by any risk likelihood matrix framework to justify that decision ?

After all how did those without cash get by if there was no power to ATM machines.

Blimey - there's an awful lot of assumption there, and unless I am misunderstanding, a contradiction from one sentence to another?    

Absolutely not, I analyze risk for a living. I would kindly ask you to point out the contradiction in my sentence (assuming you actually do understand what contradiction means).

i shouldn't engage but I'm working late and this will be a nice distraction, so let me guide you on your critical thinking journey.

Step 1) Has this kind of an outage to this extent happened before in Portugal/Spain (or anywhere in the developed world for that matter) in lets say 70 years at this scale and length of time ? No it hasn't.

Step 2) We look at the ARO (Annualized Rate of Occurrence) so right now, as mentioned above, it hasn't previously happened before so its 1 in 70 years, so that means the chance of this happening each year is 0.14 and thats being very liberal as I selected 70 years it could be much longer.

Step 3) lets look at the single loss expectancy (SLE) which in economic terms is around 2.4 billion (Reuters). The Spanish economy alone is worth 1.9 Trillion.

Now ask yourself is it worth forcing small, medium and large private businesses to adopt an archaic system that will cost them money on the off chance something that has happened once in seventy years and may cost the economy 2.4 billion (roughly 0.2% of the economy) might but probably wont happen ?

Also again I ask you, as you brought up the blackout to justify your belief how do you propose people would get hold of cash if their is a power outage ? even if you go in to a bank you need to validate your card ? Only a small number of people will have cash readily available.

So in summary your task is the following - 

Point out the contradiction good chap.
If possible follow my thought process.
Make a sensible decision.

Covered End said: minutes

Carter said:

I've had a bank fuck up and "misplace" a few thousand pounds of my money. This was only recently an its made me feel like keeping my money in a box buried underground or in a safe in my house. Their attitude to fixing their balls up was atrocious too. 

Their approach to retail banking is also ensuring that will soon vanish. They are only concerned with selling over-priced financial products as opposed to helping people manage their money. My mate helps his dad with this stuff and his dad had something like £50k in a current account and all the arseholes did when he took his dad down there to move most of it into a savings account was be obstructive and attempt to sell mortgages with shite rates, credit cards this guy plainly didn’t need before telling my pal they would only issue the money in installments over 2 weeks, asking him to take it out in £5k lumps, walk it along to the other bank his dad had opened a savings account in and deposit the cash in there. Absolutely no reason they couldn't have transferred it via BACS immediately. 

I find that almost impossible to believe unless there is more to it.
No right minded person would suggest that.
It sounds to me more like your mate asked to withdraw the £50K in cash and they didn't have it and would have had to order the cash on the next run, so suggested take out £5K if and when they had it. 
Which bank was it?

Bear in mind I'm telling this third-hand so I'm paraphrasing someone else paraphrasing however the guts of the story is they refused to do the transfer in branch, he absolutely didn't want fifty bags withdrawn for obvious reasons. The issue was they had plenty of opportunity to help this bloke manage his money and at the point he's (my mates dad) decided he wanted to move elsewhere they put up an unreasonable amount of resistance. My mate is not the kind to bullshit, there isn't anything in it for him and he just isn't that sort of person. The bank was TSB. Think about the situation he's in there, you are in a bank, with your dad who you are trying to assist, the bank staff refuse to play ball for whatever reason and he felt there was not a lot he could do. And on the day there wasn't other than withdraw large sums of money they could handle then physically walk that along the road to the other bank. No reason to disbelieve him although I totally accept I wasn't there