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Cashing Out
Feb. 13th, 2021 09:32 pmOdd experience today. After Eleanor and I spent a good chunk of the morning trying to get a just-out-of-warranty clothes dryer to stop sounding like a wounded moose (without success, apparently:P), I headed out on my usual late Saturday morning rounds to the office for mail and for lunch for both of us. This time, though, I was asked to make a quick stop at the nearby Asian grocery, which has ridiculously huge and low priced carrots that we cut into treats for the dog. The tab for this usually runs under three bucks.
I had no money.
Well, to be clear, I had no green folding money. Eleanor, fortunately, had enough singles to accomplish the task, but it brought home just how cashless we've become. Lunch wound up on a debit card, as it often does. Tonight's takeout dinner, on a credit card I pay off every month. But I rarely have more than a couple of Future Tubmans on my person, and it isn't unusual at all for my wallet to be completely greenless.
Much has changed from childhood, when my only sources of cash were a modest weekly allowance and the occasional godparent birthday fiver. I had paper route jobs up to high school that taught me how to handle my own and other peoples' cash, and I was treasurer of the church Yute Group which gave me my first-ever experience with a checkbook. I drew paychecks from that strange place known as Modell's in my senior year of high school, and since they were pitifully small I'm pretty sure they all just got cashed at the store office. But Cornell was the place where banks and banking became integrated into the commerce of my life. I also drew modest paychecks from work-study there at the equally strange pizza place I worked at on campus, and had some sort of financial aid that came periodically and had to go someplace. That place turned out to be a Buffalo-based institution named Marine Midland; I selected it because it had a decent checking account deal for students and had branches beyond Ithaca, even a few downstate. But it also had something that was so new, it was the thing advertisements were made of:
I have no idea where that ad's from- it came from this blog- and Clinton Street could be Syracuse, Binghamton or a half dozen other New York cities. But not Ithaca, which was one of the interesting things about this banking selection: Marine had only two branches in the whole area, neither in Collegetown or even downtown, but one beyond the far eastern edge of the Cornell campus and the other in the Pyramid Mall strip of plazas way to its north. You could walk to either, but it cut off the impulse stops for a quick twenty.
The other alternative was on-campus check cashing. The Campus Store had a window, as did the on-campus grocery store I worked at in my senior year; I think you were charged a whole dime to get up to something like a $50 check cashed. Since I rarely had that kind of money laying around in my checking account, I went more often and went through a shitload of dimes. In my senior year, I worked in the little check cashing booth attached to the North Campus store; that's where I learned that the trust fund babies had no problem maxing out those pieces of paper, and I was one of the chosen few with the combination to the "real" safe with a year's tuition in it and not the little one on top of it holding maybe $200 for the cash drawers. It taught me not to be tempted by embezzlement, a skill that has served me well in my 36 years of running a trust account. It also fed into my lifelong embracing of being cheap, and I thought nothing of walking three miles up Triphammer Road to use the MoneyMatic just to save that fucking dime.
I remained in a fractious relationship with Marine for years. After moving here for law school, I kept my Ithaca account with them until a landlady in Looney Acres (yes, there is such a place) refused to take rent checks from anything other than a "local bank," forcing me to close that one and open an identical one at a local Marine branch. I made a similar switch when moving to Rochester so I could pay my and then our first car loans at a local Marine branch as well as Round One of student loans- but then switched to the Savings and Loan that was my original law firm's landlord. First I left that building, and then First Federal did (though it still retains its defunct namesake's moniker 20 odd years later); it got bought by a Canadian financial firm but in 1997 was ultimately folded into, who else?, Marine Midland. They eventually rebranded all their worldwide subsidiaries under the parent HSBC bowtie, keeping the headquarters in Buffalo, until they finally got out of retail banking in Upstate New York. Our longago First Federal account has been converted to Marine, rebranded as HSBC, sold to a local outfit named First Niagara, and most recently folded into Key Bank. To this day, our Key checking statements have an address of a different downtown Rochester office tower- a branch I have never set foot in. HSBC, meanwhile, has reopened a few branches around Buffalo, so I fully expect to be traded to them again for draft picks at some point.
MoneyMatic descendants have, of course, become ubiquitous in the years since those first treks- universally known as ATMs now in at least the US, and in bank branches, supermarkets, parking lots and sporting venues. I rarely use any of them anymore. When I do need cash money, Wegmans lets you electronically debit up to $60 over the purchase amount as cash back; just like the days of the trust fund kids I rarely ask for that whole amount. But credit cards, and since about the oughts their direct-debit card cousins connected directly to a checking account, have long ago become the far more prevalent way of making transactions.
There's sound thinking about this not being wise. In 2002, one of our local bankruptcy judges started a program patterned on the anti-drug campaign called DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which he called CARE with a C for Credit replacing the D. Bankruptcy attorneys in our district and in many other places volunteered to speak in high schools about the dangers of easy credit; back then, credit card companies were passing out introductory cards on college campuses like candy and increasing credit limits with little thought to ability to repay, and kids not much older than Emily were showing up in his court with tens of thousands in debt not even counting their student loans. The program still exists, although when our judge retired a few years ago it ceased to be as much of a cause celebre among the local bankruptcy bar.
Among the practices preached by the program: stick to cash whenever possible, because of the tactile connection that it preserves between purchase and payment; in particular, it advocated to not use plastic of any kind for anything you eat, drink or smoke. Ironically, around the same time, federal bankruptcy courts went to an all-electronic method of filing cases, where in almost all cases you have to use a debit or credit card to pay for anything with the court.
Then, two things changed the plastic landscape. In 2005, Congress finally passed a long-wet-dreamed bill by the credit card industry to make filing consumer bankruptcy more difficult. About 10 percent of the difficulty was substantive, while the other 90 percent was just the imposition of bullshit paperwork requirements and deadlines that increased attorneys fees, decreased the number practicing to mostly crazy people like me, and delayed rather than denied the benefits of the system. Next came the 2007-08 financial crisis. Until then, the change to an all-plastic economy seemed inevitable. I can't find the video of it, but Visa took some serious and deserved shit for a mid-2000s ad campaign which shamed people for daring to slow up the choreography by paying cash. This describes the one of them I remember:
While Strauss's "Blue Danube" plays in the background, we see morning papers being delivered, a restaurateur hosing down the sidewalk in front of his business, a person hailing a cab, and eventually more and more persons making their way to their places of work. Interspersed are scenes of people using a Visa card to make small purchases--a taxi fare, a cup of coffee, a newspaper, a doughnut. But WAIT! Stop the music. Someone puts cash down on the counter. The cashier glowers. Who dares to commit this affront to the social order? The camera pans up and we see the offender. It's your average doughy, dumpy, middle-aged guy. The message is clear: only a schlub pays with cash.
Credit cards became much more restricted during and after the Great Recession, and even debit card use declined as banks found new ways to raise fees for either having the accounts in the first place or using a card to access them. But in the past year, with the added risks and cash (particularly coin) shortages resulting from COVID, cashless has rebounded- even with shlubs like me. Other than the Chinese grocery, all of my purchases today, including for things we ate and drank, were on plastic. None will cost a dime in interest or fees, and there is the benefit of being able to track them through their receipts, as we each do religiously in our own separate religious ways. But I still worry about making sure I don't start disconnecting between the purchase and payment- because we remain unvaccinated, surrounded by stupid people, and are each one bad viral droplet away from a loss of income that will render those pieces of plastic useless if there's no longer money in the Whateverbank checking account or a timely payment made on the Otherbank Visa card.
I took an extra 25 bucks from a Wegmans purchase tonight. A few of those will go toward my guilty-pleasure Sunday morning Tim Hortons run on the way to Dog Church (fewer of them than it cost a week ago, which is a nice story for another day). The rest will get me through the week of takeout orders, parking meters and the occasional library fine or hold fee.
And I'm still a doughy, dumpy middle-aged guy. With a blog that's still on the Internet, unlike that stupid commercial:P
I had no money.
Well, to be clear, I had no green folding money. Eleanor, fortunately, had enough singles to accomplish the task, but it brought home just how cashless we've become. Lunch wound up on a debit card, as it often does. Tonight's takeout dinner, on a credit card I pay off every month. But I rarely have more than a couple of Future Tubmans on my person, and it isn't unusual at all for my wallet to be completely greenless.
Much has changed from childhood, when my only sources of cash were a modest weekly allowance and the occasional godparent birthday fiver. I had paper route jobs up to high school that taught me how to handle my own and other peoples' cash, and I was treasurer of the church Yute Group which gave me my first-ever experience with a checkbook. I drew paychecks from that strange place known as Modell's in my senior year of high school, and since they were pitifully small I'm pretty sure they all just got cashed at the store office. But Cornell was the place where banks and banking became integrated into the commerce of my life. I also drew modest paychecks from work-study there at the equally strange pizza place I worked at on campus, and had some sort of financial aid that came periodically and had to go someplace. That place turned out to be a Buffalo-based institution named Marine Midland; I selected it because it had a decent checking account deal for students and had branches beyond Ithaca, even a few downstate. But it also had something that was so new, it was the thing advertisements were made of:
I have no idea where that ad's from- it came from this blog- and Clinton Street could be Syracuse, Binghamton or a half dozen other New York cities. But not Ithaca, which was one of the interesting things about this banking selection: Marine had only two branches in the whole area, neither in Collegetown or even downtown, but one beyond the far eastern edge of the Cornell campus and the other in the Pyramid Mall strip of plazas way to its north. You could walk to either, but it cut off the impulse stops for a quick twenty.
The other alternative was on-campus check cashing. The Campus Store had a window, as did the on-campus grocery store I worked at in my senior year; I think you were charged a whole dime to get up to something like a $50 check cashed. Since I rarely had that kind of money laying around in my checking account, I went more often and went through a shitload of dimes. In my senior year, I worked in the little check cashing booth attached to the North Campus store; that's where I learned that the trust fund babies had no problem maxing out those pieces of paper, and I was one of the chosen few with the combination to the "real" safe with a year's tuition in it and not the little one on top of it holding maybe $200 for the cash drawers. It taught me not to be tempted by embezzlement, a skill that has served me well in my 36 years of running a trust account. It also fed into my lifelong embracing of being cheap, and I thought nothing of walking three miles up Triphammer Road to use the MoneyMatic just to save that fucking dime.
I remained in a fractious relationship with Marine for years. After moving here for law school, I kept my Ithaca account with them until a landlady in Looney Acres (yes, there is such a place) refused to take rent checks from anything other than a "local bank," forcing me to close that one and open an identical one at a local Marine branch. I made a similar switch when moving to Rochester so I could pay my and then our first car loans at a local Marine branch as well as Round One of student loans- but then switched to the Savings and Loan that was my original law firm's landlord. First I left that building, and then First Federal did (though it still retains its defunct namesake's moniker 20 odd years later); it got bought by a Canadian financial firm but in 1997 was ultimately folded into, who else?, Marine Midland. They eventually rebranded all their worldwide subsidiaries under the parent HSBC bowtie, keeping the headquarters in Buffalo, until they finally got out of retail banking in Upstate New York. Our longago First Federal account has been converted to Marine, rebranded as HSBC, sold to a local outfit named First Niagara, and most recently folded into Key Bank. To this day, our Key checking statements have an address of a different downtown Rochester office tower- a branch I have never set foot in. HSBC, meanwhile, has reopened a few branches around Buffalo, so I fully expect to be traded to them again for draft picks at some point.
MoneyMatic descendants have, of course, become ubiquitous in the years since those first treks- universally known as ATMs now in at least the US, and in bank branches, supermarkets, parking lots and sporting venues. I rarely use any of them anymore. When I do need cash money, Wegmans lets you electronically debit up to $60 over the purchase amount as cash back; just like the days of the trust fund kids I rarely ask for that whole amount. But credit cards, and since about the oughts their direct-debit card cousins connected directly to a checking account, have long ago become the far more prevalent way of making transactions.
There's sound thinking about this not being wise. In 2002, one of our local bankruptcy judges started a program patterned on the anti-drug campaign called DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which he called CARE with a C for Credit replacing the D. Bankruptcy attorneys in our district and in many other places volunteered to speak in high schools about the dangers of easy credit; back then, credit card companies were passing out introductory cards on college campuses like candy and increasing credit limits with little thought to ability to repay, and kids not much older than Emily were showing up in his court with tens of thousands in debt not even counting their student loans. The program still exists, although when our judge retired a few years ago it ceased to be as much of a cause celebre among the local bankruptcy bar.
Among the practices preached by the program: stick to cash whenever possible, because of the tactile connection that it preserves between purchase and payment; in particular, it advocated to not use plastic of any kind for anything you eat, drink or smoke. Ironically, around the same time, federal bankruptcy courts went to an all-electronic method of filing cases, where in almost all cases you have to use a debit or credit card to pay for anything with the court.
Then, two things changed the plastic landscape. In 2005, Congress finally passed a long-wet-dreamed bill by the credit card industry to make filing consumer bankruptcy more difficult. About 10 percent of the difficulty was substantive, while the other 90 percent was just the imposition of bullshit paperwork requirements and deadlines that increased attorneys fees, decreased the number practicing to mostly crazy people like me, and delayed rather than denied the benefits of the system. Next came the 2007-08 financial crisis. Until then, the change to an all-plastic economy seemed inevitable. I can't find the video of it, but Visa took some serious and deserved shit for a mid-2000s ad campaign which shamed people for daring to slow up the choreography by paying cash. This describes the one of them I remember:
While Strauss's "Blue Danube" plays in the background, we see morning papers being delivered, a restaurateur hosing down the sidewalk in front of his business, a person hailing a cab, and eventually more and more persons making their way to their places of work. Interspersed are scenes of people using a Visa card to make small purchases--a taxi fare, a cup of coffee, a newspaper, a doughnut. But WAIT! Stop the music. Someone puts cash down on the counter. The cashier glowers. Who dares to commit this affront to the social order? The camera pans up and we see the offender. It's your average doughy, dumpy, middle-aged guy. The message is clear: only a schlub pays with cash.
Credit cards became much more restricted during and after the Great Recession, and even debit card use declined as banks found new ways to raise fees for either having the accounts in the first place or using a card to access them. But in the past year, with the added risks and cash (particularly coin) shortages resulting from COVID, cashless has rebounded- even with shlubs like me. Other than the Chinese grocery, all of my purchases today, including for things we ate and drank, were on plastic. None will cost a dime in interest or fees, and there is the benefit of being able to track them through their receipts, as we each do religiously in our own separate religious ways. But I still worry about making sure I don't start disconnecting between the purchase and payment- because we remain unvaccinated, surrounded by stupid people, and are each one bad viral droplet away from a loss of income that will render those pieces of plastic useless if there's no longer money in the Whateverbank checking account or a timely payment made on the Otherbank Visa card.
I took an extra 25 bucks from a Wegmans purchase tonight. A few of those will go toward my guilty-pleasure Sunday morning Tim Hortons run on the way to Dog Church (fewer of them than it cost a week ago, which is a nice story for another day). The rest will get me through the week of takeout orders, parking meters and the occasional library fine or hold fee.
And I'm still a doughy, dumpy middle-aged guy. With a blog that's still on the Internet, unlike that stupid commercial:P