Again, this isn’t the promised quasi-academic rant that I keep harping on about, my current employment involves a gargantuan volume of writing and, to be utterly honest, it has taken the joy out of writing for Losing Face in my evenings. I am plodding along with it though and it will be upon your screen as soon as I think it makes sense.
This however, is a post about living without cash outside of London… as the title may well suggest through it’s tenuous play on words.
Yesterday, a colleague and I had a meeting in Cambridge followed by a scheduled filming session on the high street; our excursion consumed the entire working day. Leaving Liverpool Street with a hop and a skip in our step despite the cumbersome camera gear, we went on our merry way. Our tickets were bought on a company debit card online days in advance, the snacks for the train were bought in a station shop without a minimum spend, everything was pretty darn rosy.
Whilst on [the loudest ever] train, my colleague realised that we had managed to remember everything except release forms for our unsuspecting Cambridge-ian-adonian-ites (?!?!?!). That meant our first stop in Cambridge would no longer be the nearest caffeine vendor but a internet café to hunt down a release form template and to save our afternoon from being a waste of time.
Being a sucker for all things ‘Web2.0’, in which I can even manage my online banking through my normal phone let alone keep track of my friends’ every movement, I could scarcely believe those seedy, rotten internet cafés of 2002 still existed. Adding another level of technological irony, I actually google-map searched ‘internet café’ on my mobile to get directions to the nearest outlet from my current location… oh this modern age!
Anyway, found the internet café, 2p per minute, 10p per A4 print – awesome.
“No cards accepted” – not awesome.
My colleague says she’ll pay – splendid.
Printer is broken – not splendid.
Man in shop is a rip off merchant and busts us for a minimum cash spend stated in the small print on the back wall of this dimly lit hell hole – utter prick.
We have what we want, a less than watertight release form and directions to a copy place, next stop: coffee.
Cambridge is a beautiful city and, considering I grew up just outside of Oxford, it really is an impressive ‘University town’; the place was alive with bicycle bells and the sweet smell of culture. Amongst the cobble streets and dominating college buildings is a lovely new shopping arcade/mall and in it was a Costa outlet, however – unlike London where even the cheapest of purchases was acceptable on card – I had to pay for both drinks to come close to their card minimum. Dang.
Next stop was our meeting at Cambridge Students’ Union; it went well and is entirely irrelevant to this post. We will move swiftly on.
Post-successful meeting, the two of us decided to grab a bite to eat before hitting the streets armed with camera and microphone after all, being continually rejected and ignored takes a lot of energy.
We hit up a familiar brand of high street food convenience, Eat.
There is an Eat within a really hefty stone’s throw of my office near Spitalfields, I go there a lot because it is closer than many other place and I’m quite slovenly come lunchtime but also, beyond it just taking cards, it also accepts pay-wave. The novelty of which is yet to wear off and I snap at any opportunity to effortlessly beep away my hard earned money on stuff that, if I could be bothered, would be able to bring into work myself each morning.
I entered Eat Cambridge expecting the same level of ease of those in London; the hardest decision being whether I really needed some vegetable crisps or whether I just want them because they are in front of me and look healthier than the almost villainous looking, heat-attack inducing, chocolate brownie right next to them.
I was wrong. The crisps bit was the easy part.
I had to spend a fiver to use my card…! That is the highest minimum spend I have come across in a long time, and for it to be the case at such a prominent, nation-wide chain – I was more than a little flabbergasted. I made up my tally by paying for my colleagues lunch after my shocked, “really?!? oh I wasn’t expecting that and I am soooo put out by this but too polite to say anything other than by giving you this look” eyes failed to coerce the teller into making an exception for this dumb-founded, London-centric tourist.
As if that wasn’t hassle enough, I had to sign for the purchase! I know it has barely been 18 months since the Valentines Day switch to ‘Chip and Pin’ in the UK but I genuinely can’t remember the last thing I paid for by signing a receipt. My card doesn’t even have a signature on it anymore, my washing machine stole away the biro scrawl a long time ago and I have had no reason to rewrite it!
Not only was the surface wet and therefore the receipt stuck to someone else’s spilt coffee, the first pen didn’t work, the kind lady behind the kiosk apologised avidly whilst hurriedly charging about the place trying to find another. When she found one she passed it to me but dropped it behind her till, scrabbling around for it with her slight fingers she apologised further, it had become an awkward length of time and all I wanted was my fucking vegetable crisps.
Eventually she wormed the pen out hiding, passed it to me, I signed, she pretended to check the signature against something that I know doesn’t exist and politely handed me back my card with a smile and fist full of coffee stained receipt.
Joy.
I can’t even be bothered to go into detail about the saga of paying for photocopies of the release form, rest assured it follows a similar theme added to only by my increasing agitation and home-sickness for unquestioned plastic purchases.
I guess, following from my last post about Digital Money Forum’s take on why cards are still a costly choice, yesterday was an excellent example of why that is the case. It is almost a vicious circle; the minority of purchases are by card and therefore the system is weighted towards the cash majority and so fewer people will choose the more expensive card alternative, which means the system will remain bias toward cash purchases… et al.
One thing that I am certain about, Losing Face – as a bet, an adventure, experiment or however you might see it – would be much harder (if not impossible) if I lived outside London.
1 Comment
October 15, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
Tim Ramsey