Depending on where you live, you may have noticed more and more businesses going “cashless” recently. Every week, it seems like there’s a new example. In Australia, the popular grilled-chicken restaurant Nando’s recently announced that none of its locations would accept cash as a form of payment. In the U.K., the Tesco grocery chain has opened two cashless stores in London, possibly the first of many. Closer to the Current Affairs offices in New Orleans, the local Ace Hardware has gone cashless, and so have all the vendors at the Superdome and the annual Jazz Fest. The list could go on. According to the AARP, the “share of cashless businesses more than doubled from February 2020 to February 2021,” accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and “22 percent of small-business owners envision a fully cashless society within 10 years.” Industry journals like International Banker and PaymentsJournal have even taken to calling a cashless world “inevitable.” Of course, most things proclaimed as “inevitable” actually aren’t—and we should definitely hope the “cashless society” is one of those, because it’s a terrible idea. 

There are a few points in favor of making electronic payments the norm, of course. If nothing else, being able to simply tap your credit card or your phone wherever you go is convenient. It discourages certain forms of petty crime, too. A corner store or a coffee shop that doesn’t keep cash on the premises is less likely to have its windows smashed in by thieves, or its employees held up at gunpoint. The same goes for other old-school crimes, like mugging and pickpocketing, which become less rewarding if nobody carries physical money. If your credit card is stolen, you can just call the appropriate 1-800 number and have it frozen; a wad of cash is gone forever. 

But the crime-reduction case has been overstated, too. As Niclas Rolander and Jonas Ekblom recently reported for Bloomberg, Sweden is at the forefront of the “cashless” movement worldwide, with most bank offices dealing exclusively in e-payments and “only 8% of Swedes [saying] they had used cash for their latest purchase” in a 2022 survey. Predictably, crimes like armed robbery in shops have declined there, and bank robberies fell to zero in 2022—something the analytics website Statista says is “down to the digitalization of the bank system.” But at the same time, other types of crime—like identity theft and online scams—have surged. Phasing out cash didn’t actually reduce the overall amount of crime, at least not to any dramatic extent. It just changed the prevailing form of theft from analog to digital. 

 Meanwhile, the “cashless society” is a bleak and hostile place for certain marginalized groups of people. For the homeless—who are already suffering plenty, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that city governments can arrest them for sleeping outside—the situation is disastrous. According to a Pew survey taken in 2022, 41 percent of Americans make none of their weekly purchases in cash, which strongly suggests they don’t even carry the stuff. If fewer people carry cash, fewer people will have spare change or small bills to hand out to those who desperately need a donation. In the Washington Post, Maia Silber gives a sad account of how increasing “cashlessness” makes it harder to get by: 

John Sullivan wears a giant foam hat in the shape of a whale. It works well as a conversation starter when he panhandles on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street in Georgetown. But one hot afternoon in July, no one stops to ask Sullivan about the whale. And no one stops to drop a dollar in his pink plastic cup. Passing by, one young man in sunglasses turns and shrugs. “I don’t have any cash,” he says apologetically. That’s a refrain Sullivan has heard a lot lately. He has panhandled in the same spot for almost 20 years and has a good rapport with the locals, who call him “the whale man.” But in the past three years or so, more and more pedestrians have been telling him that they no longer carry paper bills or loose change. 

Sullivan’s good-natured about it: “I’ll see you next time,” he says with a smile if a passerby claims to have nothing but a credit card. Lots of people actually do come back the next day with change, he says — but still, he takes in only half what he once did. 

In fact, the “cashless society” hits homeless people coming and going. It makes it harder to get money, and it also reduces the number of businesses willing to accept whatever coins and bills someone manages to scrape together. Bank accounts almost always require a permanent address, and apps like PayPal and Venmo require a smartphone—which some people living on the street may have, but many others will not. The same brutal logic applies to undocumented immigrants, who are often paid in cash under the table, and face difficulties getting bank accounts because they lack enough identifying paperwork. Even elderly people, who may distrust or be confused by new technologies, wind up disadvantaged. In the U.K., dozens of older people have been hit by unexpected fines after they didn’t realize a car park used a “pay-by-app” system, leading to criticisms that they were being “digitally excluded.” In all these cases, going cashless can be understood as a form of gentrification. It makes the world frictionless and easy for those who can afford it, and shuts out those who can’t. 

That’s not the worst of it, either. Historically, cash has been a vital lifeline for people fleeing abusive situations of all kinds. In Afro-Caribbean communities, there’s even a term for this, “vex money”:  

Noun. Origin: Anglophone Caribbean. Meaning: money stashed on your person or in a secret place (a brassiere, a bank account, your grandmother’s Bible, your sneakers). To be spent only in case of emergency brought upon by a once stable situation suddenly becoming vexed — usually but not always because of a man. See: the need for a swift exit in response to the threat of sexual assault. See also: the dissolution of a relationship, the loss of a job or being displaced from your home. Related to but not the same as the threat often uttered by an Afro-Caribbean woman: “Don’t get me vex.” 

In a “cashless society,” no such thing would exist. It’s well-documented that coercive control of bank accounts goes hand-in-hand with domestic abuse, and widespread “cashlessness” would only amplify the effect of that control, cutting off avenues of escape. For a partner trying to leave an unbearable marriage, or an LGBTQ teenager trapped in a home with bigoted parents, it could make all the difference. 

Let’s suppose, though, that you’re an utterly callous bastard. (In the field of economics, you’ll fit right in.) You don’t care about homeless people, immigrants, the elderly, or people fleeing abuse; your only concern is whether a financial system is efficient and reliable. Even in these terms, the “cashless society” is still a bad bet. Just this month, there was a catastrophic breakdown in the functioning of Windows-based computer systems, the result of a small flaw in a piece of antivirus software called CrowdStrike. Thousands of airline flights were canceled, hospitals couldn’t access patient records, and businesses around the world found themselves unable to take credit cards—let alone Apple Pay and other phone-based services. Only the people who still carry cash were able to go about their business, largely unaffected. That’s a perfect demonstration of how fragile today’s digital economy really is. This month, it was a programming glitch. Tomorrow, it might be a natural disaster that knocks the power and internet out across a whole region. Thanks to climate change, things like hurricanes and wildfires are becoming more common, and more intense, by the day. What happens to a city like New Orleans or Orlando when the next Katrina hits, and all anyone has are touchless terminals with their screens gone blank? 

 Finally, there’s the political dimension. One of the first casualties in a fully cashless economy would be whatever remains of our tattered sense of privacy. With physical money no longer an option, every transaction would be a matter of record, linked to your name and account number. Again, there are advantages to this; it would make things like black-market weapons dealing and human trafficking vastly harder, for instance. But do you really want the government and the big financial companies to have a full dossier of every dollar you’ve ever spent? You might think you have nothing to hide, but remember that right-wing zealots like Ron DeSantis and Jeff Landry currently hold political power. In a “cashless society,” what would stop government officials in a state like Florida from tracking the transaction records for everyone who’s ever bought a mifepristone abortion pill? Or, for that matter, shutting down the accounts of people and organizations they disapprove of?  

The latter isn’t a hypothetical. Already, there’s been a noticeable trend of people being “de-banked” for political reasons. In Canada, Justin Trudeau’s government invoked a piece of legislation called the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of several anti-vaccine protestors, who were blocking major roads with their trucks at the time, for about a week in 2022. To be clear, the truck protest was extremely stupid and even harmful—but the idea that a national government can just declare an “emergency” and prevent anyone they like from accessing their money is even more chilling. More sympathetic people have come under fire from “de-banking” too, like the 40 percent of sex workers who reported having their bank accounts abruptly closed in 2023, or the protestor against Atlanta’s “Cop City” who had her Chase Bank accounts canceled shortly after she was arrested. Even PayPal has a laundry list of terms that will get your account flagged as “suspicious,” many of them openly political—like the people who’ve been flagged for buying a “Persian” rug or a “Cubano” sandwich, or the time Current Affairs tried to pay freelance writer Adam Patterson for an article about ISIS and had the magazine’s account briefly suspended. (As if any real terrorist would be writing “For Terror” in the box!) A “cashless society” puts people at the mercy of big financial institutions, and they’ve proven over and over again that they simply can’t be trusted.  

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having tap payments at your bodega, or leaving your house with nothing but a smartphone or an Apple Watch to pay for things. (I wouldn’t do it, but hey, you make your own calls.) One day, when we’ve got global socialism, eliminating money altogether would be a worthy goal. But right now, removing cash from the equation hurts the poorest and most vulnerable among us. It hands greater control of our lives to huge political and financial entities that don’t have our best interests in mind, and it makes the whole economic system more fragile and prone to breakdown. At best, it shows that the industry leaders pushing “cashless” systems haven’t thought it through properly; at worst, it shows that they just don’t care. Either way, we need to resist any further push to phase out physical money. Around the United States, cities like Los Angeles are currently trying to pass legislation banning cashless businesses entirely. Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. have already done so, among others. That’s the right thing to do. Life under capitalism is already bad enough; the “cashless society” is a nightmare we don’t need.