Will the hi-tech cashless future leave a dinosaur like me behind?

[HHTel]

You're local/home internet may go down but automatically switched to city wide internet. I've had instances where my own wifi is down but I've not had a problem and unlike the UK phone coverage is 95% in Thailand.

[Big Boy]

Not with a decent power cut - it takes everything.

[Dannie Boy]

The main thing is that we have a choice of whether to go cashless or not - in Thailand I much prefer to use cash whereas when I visit the UK I generally use cash for low value transactions and cashless for the bigger things - as far as I’m concerned I hope to continue this way until I stop spending!!

[HHTel]

Not with a decent power cut - it takes everything.

I suppose if it's a wide power cut affecting your ISP that would happen. I've never found a problem even during a power cut. AIS will provide the connection to your ISP, but of course they charge for it.

Maybe I've been lucky but I've never been unable to get internet on my phone.

[PeteC]

The elephant in the room is the event of war. I'm sure there are already bugs implanted in every system on earth by the Chinese, Russians, Iranians and North Koreans to literally turn off everything with the flick of a switch.

Do the good guys know this and have solutions in place already? Let's all hope so, or at least those who have forgotten or never knew how to live without current technology.

You've seen what happened last week with the Finland/Germany Baltic Sea cable break. Assuredly a Chinese ship dragged its anchor and broke two cables. Not very high tech espionage, and it disabled communications between those two countries, and perhaps others. There are vulnerabilities everywhere.

[STEVE G]

Not with a decent power cut - it takes everything.

If there's a power cut, shops in MV are going to close anyway, however you were thinking of paying!
I've just been reading that cash payments are only around 10% now in the UK with around 50% being debit cards.

[Dannie Boy]

Not with a decent power cut - it takes everything.

If there's a power cut, shops in MV are going to close anyway, however you were thinking of paying!
I've just been reading that cash payments are only around 10% now in the UK with around 50% being debit cards.

Is that 10% by value or transactions - I’m assuming value, where like myself I tend to use cash for low value and cashless for high value items?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[STEVE G]

^
Cash use in UK transactions declined for the successive year, while the market share of debit and credit cards increased again. Debit cards were the most popular method in POS transactions in the United Kingdom in 2022, accounting for 47 percent of transactions. This was far higher than transactions with banknotes or coins, accounting for 10 percent of brick-and-mortar payments in 2022.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/972 ... 0in%202022.

[dtaai-maai]

I prefer a bit of human interaction, especially if it's a big shop (with lots of bottles... ) and the checkout lady will pack for you, but just very occasionally, if I only have a handful of items and the checkouts are busy, I use these self-checkout things. I'm getting there slowly, but such things as finding where to scan my loyalty card phone app can take time...

[STEVE G]

When I'm in Luxembourg, all my local supermarkets are now self checkout. That means that paying cash means feeding banknotes and coins into one of those fussy machines that rejects anything it considers imperfect and doesn't exactly leave you with a "cash is king" feeling.
Even one of them that still has a staffed checkout to scan your items still requires you to pay your cash into a machine on the front of the till.
If anyone wants to experience this level of customer frustration in Hua Hin, they now have one of these self checkouts in the Tops supermarket at the end of soi 88.

[GroveHillWanderer]

You've seen what happened last week with the Finland/Germany Baltic Sea cable break. Assuredly a Chinese ship dragged its anchor and broke two cables. Not very high tech espionage, and it disabled communications between those two countries, and perhaps others. There are vulnerabilities everywhere.

No communications were lost because of the cables you mention being cut because, as mentioned in the BBC article below:

other cable routes were available.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dl4vxw501o

Germany suspects sabotage behind severed undersea cables

[GroveHillWanderer]

Not with a decent power cut - it takes everything.

If you're in a shop trying to pay, the main problem would be that the tills in the shop wouldn't work without power. Your phone would probably still have internet connectivity, at least in the short term, because most cell phone towers have battery backup systems to get them through power outages - for a while, anyway.

[buksida]

The 'dinosaurs' would have laughed today at Makro. We nipped in there to grab supplies for a road trip so I hit the ATM to get cash for use when in remote areas and planned to pay via mobile banking. Got to the checkout and was told "QR mai dai, no internet", a store-wide outage apparently. Ok, fine, can I use one of my Thai bank cards? "Mai dai," Makro only accepts cards from one obscure bank (very forward-thinking business decision that one - make it harder for customers to pay you). The queues at the only working ATM in the store were going out of the door ... luckily I had that stash already on me, so we were through and out before 'unhappy hour' and left the chaos in the dust.

Moral of the story: cash is still king so keep some on you!

[caller]

Makro only accepts cards from one obscure bank

Not so obscure - it's UOB - part of a Singaporean multi-national operation, that is the 3rd largest in SE Asia. In Thailand, their brand new HQ is based on Sukhumvit by Phrom Phong BTS.

I think it's credit cards only. They accept mine.

[404cameljockey]

Makro only accepts cards from one obscure bank

I think it's credit cards only. They accept mine.

To clarify this, do you mean credit cards and not debit cards, yes? Thanks.