What If There's No Cash?

It's also possible that while the bulk of stamps are undervalued, there are more undervalued rarities out there that can be hunted down. Half the fun of these hobbies is looking for weird little surprises.

For a few days during the quarantine we actually habitually paid with cash, because it was more convenient to take cash out of envelope 1 and put change in envelope 2 than to pay with a card and have to enter the PIN on those dirty buttons.

Eventually we started more regularly using gloves, so the dirty buttons stopped being (as much of) a problem, but it turned out that some of the smaller stores near our home (including the very closest, which we'd probably be forced to use eventually) don't accept cards at all (usually because they don't have the right kind of card reader).

In my town they're not all taking plastic. If they don't take cash they will lose my business. I don't carry a credit card so I'm not carrying the mark. If I leave my cell phone home it doesn't bother me.

I'm bumping this thread as I've just returned from helping my brother at a model railroad fair. He has a business selling model railroad items and usually attends big fairs all around the UK several times a year, in addition to selling online and trading on ebay. However, owing to COVID-19, many fairs have been cancelled and this is the first one we've done together since November 2019.

The people who buy things at model railroad fairs tend to be 99% male and of all ages, although there are a high proportion of pre-teens and a lot of seniors. Most of these customers have always paid in cash. It's not uncommon to see a ten-year-old boy choose a £25 locomotive and get out a pocketful of 50p and pound coins saved from his pocket money. Similarly, seniors have often paid in coins.

But this year I noticed a dramatic difference. Whereas in 2019 perhaps 10% of our sales were on cards and 90% in cash, at this recent show about two-thirds of our business was on cards. In the past customers have tendered scarce coins such as Olympic 50p's and Alphabet 10p's but this time we only got a handful of 10p and 50p coins of any kind, and no scarce dates.

Whereas in the past, customers would often apolgise if they had no cash and ask if we could take a card, this time it was the other way around, with several asking us if it would be OK to pay in cash!