Question. When you walk out the door to run errands or shop, do you grab your wallet, the car fob and some cash? It’s the cash element that I’m curious about. Are baby boomers the last proponents of paying with cash? Sure seems that way when just about everyone is tapping their credit or debit cards at the check-out counter.
An Empower survey of American attitudes toward cash, indicated that 52% of respondents said cash was king, 49% said they felt safer with cash, and 27% said they carry cash with them every day.
If you’ve been overseas lately, you may have noticed that no one there is using cash. They hold their phone near the payment terminal in their favorite cafe, it beeps and they are out the door with their coffee.
According to CapitalOne, as of March 2025, 47.8% of American adults make NO cash purchases in a typical week. More than 63% expect a cashless future and globally, point-of-sale transactions were 85% cashless in 2024.
No-cash establishments are very common in Europe so it won’t be long before we see it here in the U.S. There is no law that requires businesses to accept cash and COVID ramped up the trend to go cashless for hygienic reasons (the filthy lucre argument).
For baby boomers, the lack of control over their spending may be the biggest disadvantage to going cashless, along with the lack of privacy regarding how you’re using your money, and those pesky data breaches that keep cropping up to expose us to fraud. Sometimes you just want to buy something without anyone keeping tabs on where your money is going.
It just might be the tactile experience of handling cash that still makes it attractive to boomers. You can count it and rest assured that you have enough to pay for a movie ticket and some popcorn. You leave home with $70 and when you get back home you can count it again and know that you spent some but still have $45 remaining. It’s elemental that way but surely we won’t be able to hold out when they put a chip in our foreheads and we just need to nod to record our payment on the way out the door.
Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.
