Even gen Z are resorting to cash - and I'm clinging to my own handful of it | Gaby Hinsliff

Power outages, the needs of vulnerable people and a general descent into dystopia are all reasons to resist banks' dream of a cashless society

Opening my wallet, I'm down to my last five dollars. Dog-eared leftovers from a foreign holiday that I keep forgetting to take to the bank, they have somehow ended up being the only physical money I always carry, now there are so few places to use the British folding stuff.

Our village pub was for years a cash-only enterprise, possibly as a means of deterring customers from outside the village (long, gloriously eccentric story), and I keep a few pound coins rattling around the car for shopping trolleys. But using actual money feels mildly eccentric in most places now, or even faintly shady: increasingly cafes and bars are adopting no cash" rules upfront to save the hassle of carting their takings to some faraway bank branch. Half of us have recently been somewhere that either didn't accept cash or positively discouraged it, according to a survey by the ATM network Link. But since most people long ago switched to tapping a card reader, what's the problem?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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