Cash is Dead

The error of choreographing a cashless society.

January 26, 2007 — CSO — By now, you've probably seen the Visa commercial "Lunch," in which consumers move beautifully through a cafeteria as if lunch were Ziegfeld's Follies, filling their trays with high-speed, clock-like precision and grace and paying for lunch with debit cards, until one customer decides—GASP!—to pay with cash. The impossibly catchy tune (Raymond Scott's iconic "Powerhouse," of Looney Tunes fame) grinds to a halt, the choreography disassembles, food spills. Everyone stares at this man; one woman sneers viciously. The message is clear: Cash is not pretty. Cash impedes. It makes a mess of things. Using cash affronts your fellow citizens who have stuff to do! Cash, finally, is bad.

Even if the ad's Orwellian overtones—unthinking industrial conformity, anti-individualism—escaped the company, they haven't escaped those who've watched the spot on YouTube. Commenting on the dancing debit-card holders directing their disdain at Mr. Cash, one person cleverly writes: "They'll be late for today's Two Minute Hate! The horror!" Another YouTuber called the spot "sinister" and at least three of 30 posts told Visa to do something involving the F-word. The spot has been "favorited" (officially the worst verb ever) fewer than one in a thousand times.

Retailers, on the other hand, probably love the spot. In addition to Visa, whose interest in denigrating cash transactions is obvious, retailers will tell you that cash is bad for them, too. Cash requires handling, and insurance for cash handling. It requires expensive safes and armored car services and trustworthy employees. Cash fosters risks like fraud, skimming the till, armed robbery and ram raids, a destructive kind of theft involving heavy vehicles plowing through a building to get at a safe.

From a security perspective, retailers can argue that the less they deal with cash, the less overhead they'll incur on cash protection, fraud deterrence, employee safety and so forth. Less overhead means savings on operating expenses which, eventually, will trickle down to the consumer, right. Is the cafeteria going to reduce the price of a burger because everyone's using a debit card, or just pocket the savings? Maybe the customer is always right, but the shareholder is always more right.

Retailers and card issuers also prefer plastic over cash because of its marketing potential. A permanently stored debit transaction, or series of transactions, creates a valuable profile of consumer shopping habits. It's hard to use and/or sell that mined marketing data when you don't have it because your customer paid with sawbucks. (For these same reasons, the government believes cashâ¬"s anonymity is an impediment to its war against various nouns like terror and drugs). From a marketer's perspective, cash makes it harder to make money. Behind all the musical pomp, what the ad really says is not that cash is bad, but rather that cash is bad for Visa, and by extension, the cafeteria.