“Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please,” was the raucous chorus of a 1980 hit single for a south London combo called Slodgenessabounds, reflecting the familiar words of millions of British pub-goers. Once served, coin money was thrust over the counter in payment and often signed off: “Keep the change.”
Pub-style cash tipping was already withering away before Covid-19. Will post-lockdown fear, social distancing, facial masking, and aversion to shared surface contact, finally finish off tipping and put paid to King Cash?
Retail is leading the anti-cash charge – shop cashiers recoil from dingy, disease-riddled clutters of coins and cocaine-smeared banknotes. Swipe, Chip and Pin, moby apps, start an account (once called a ‘tab’ or ‘slate’), anything but a fistful of actual ‘readies’ as payment.
As cash transactions vanish from quotidian lifestyles, hastened by Covid paranoia, so the tip, the gratuity, the ‘pourboire’, dish-dash, will become extinct. And that will inflict collateral damage.
Many minimum wage, zero-hours, gig economy workers boost their incomes to sustainable levels through tips. In the US, this is a given principle of eating out – you always leave a tip. Tips incentivise good service. How do you reward your waiter, cloakroom attendant, hairdresser or taxi-driver with a little personal gift when six feet separate you, and they can’t take cash?
Charities too will suffer. The spirit of Boxing Day will be a meaningless relic of some Dickensian past? The collection box, the rattling charity bucket, what use they in cash-less society where communal gatherings are frowned upon?
As cash is swept away, even beggars will have to upgrade from upturned hat and dog on a rope, to wireless card machines.
Goodbye bank branches, farewell the likes of NCR, cash register giants. Cheerio, ATMs.
Hardened bank blaggers will join highwaymen as folkloric Robin Hoods, who in times of yore, grabbed the banks’ lucre at the points of their sawn-offs, and jetted off to Spain. What could the Great Train Robbers do with their bundles of loot in Tesco today?
How will cash-only occupations soldier on after Covid – barbers, market traders, County Lines gangs, street hookers?
I’ll lay odds when Covid lockdown is finally lifted for pubs, that J D Wetherspoons boss, Tim Martin, declares his chain of hostelries cash free.
You’ll ask nostalgically who you used to tip – cabbies, waiters, hotel staff, the milkman, Venetian gondoliers, delivery drivers? Sainsbury’s delivery ‘key worker heroes’ are now officially forbidden to accept gratuities from customers – it’s there in writing in their contracts.
Unnervingly, once we are deprived of cash, and all our assets are digitised, it will only take the flick of a power switch to close the world’s entire money supply down.
And that shoebox under the bed with a couple of grand stashed away, won’t fare any better, as no-one will even recognise your shiny bits of paper you desperately wave at them.
However, if you showed them a glimpse of a glistening diamond or the glitter of solid gold – well, that will do nicely, Sir.