Do you remember the time when, once a week, you’d be handed a small manilla envelope containing your wages for the previous week in cash, along with a carbon copy of a handwritten pay slip?
That time wasn’t so very long ago but there are plenty of people in reasonably senior positions in companies today who have no idea just how recent that was. Time has moved on and these days not only does your pay end up in your bank account electronically but technology even automatically records when you turn up at work and when you leave. Oh, and some get to work from home by remote, how about that? Even better, there are apps that can be loaded into your smart phone, computer or smart watch that use latest generation GPS to record in real time, where in the house (or office or work site) you actually are and to some degree even what you’re doing. No need for time sheets any more, just an electronic chip…
But I digress. Do you remember the days when if you wanted to pay your power bill you had to go in to the local power company with your account and cash or a cheque? And do the same with your telephone account at the Post Office? And if any of that cash you got in your pay was destined for the bank, you had to fill in a bank deposit slip at the bank and hand it over to a cashier – long before the advent of debit cards and ATMs. Paying other bills was done by cheque and businesses spent a lot of time and money chasing cheques that ‘bounced’ because of insufficient funds.
Those were the days right?
Slowly but surely, a little bit here and a little bit there, electronics have been taking over and there are plenty of businesses these days that simply don’t accept cash.
Supermarkets go out of their way to make it hard. Firstly, they stopped providing a proper checkout service and are pushing us harder and harder to go into the self-service registers and do the whole thing ourselves. They offer no extra discount or incentive for this but at some times the queues in the regular checkouts are huge and gone are the days of ‘12 items or fewer’ (they would have ‘or less’ on their signs – but that’s for another day). These days they want us all to fight our way through self-service checkouts where, as a general rule, seven out of 10 checkouts are ‘card only’ and only three are ‘cash and card’. So, if you’re paying cash, just watch cardholders tie up the three cash and card checkouts as you stand in the queue waiting.
An absolutely clear case of discrimination. But who cares? Nobody except me I suspect.
Is this a good time to remind everybody of what happened in 2020? How the Labour Government locked us in our houses for the greater good? How they forced our elderly and unwell to die alone? How they banned us from driving around and forced us to stay in our areas? How the police became jackbooted zealots and vigorously policed boundaries? How they forced us by mandate and fear to take an untested medication or stay locked away forever: the famous Ardern two-tier society. Remember her proud smirking response to that question: “Yup, yup, that’s what it is”. Shame on her.
All things we never in a million years would have expected in our free society...but again I digress. They used emergency powers and behaved as tyrants. What’s to stop them doing it again and blocking your income unless you comply? Trudeau did it in Canada. Whoever would have thought?
The convenience of digital banking (and all the other things we do via technology these days) has many benefits. Alongside those benefits are many dangers. We saw a smattering of what politicians all over the world were not only capable of doing but willingly did.
A stupid delay in a supermarket queue today: total tyrannical control of all digital transactions tomorrow.
Do you trust them?
I don’t. That’s why it can only end badly.
