Strapped For Cash

Words by Joseph Slicker (he/him)

I don’t carry cash anymore. I get paid by direct debit and I spend using a card. Nowadays, I only receive cash on special occasions; a few bills tucked into a birthday card that I pretend not to notice until I’ve read the message inside. Likewise, I only spend cash on special occasions—mostly on getting tattoos and buying drugs— and my card does fine for everything else. 

This state of affairs has led me into a bizarre mindset: When I spend money in cash, it doesn’t feel like I’m really spending money at all. Sure, the few loose notes that have been sitting in my wallet since I got them at Christmas are gone, but the little numbers in my bank app didn’t change, so spending cash doesn’t make me feel guilty the same way that spending money from a card does.

A quick poll of my friends reveals most of them share my feelings, that somehow spending real, tangible, physical cash feels less like spending ‘real’ money than seeing an amount pop up on an EFTPOS machine and reluctantly tapping your card. Maybe three years of Media Studies has just melted my brain, but I find that fascinating. The mediated form of our currency is widely perceived as somehow ‘more real’ than its tangible equivalent. At least that seems to be the consensus amongst our generation. 

The collapse of cash as the go-to mode of spending money has a long history that, if we were real nerds, I’m sure we could follow all the way back to the IOUs issued by European banks during the Late Middle Ages. If this were an essay I was doing last minute, I might even try to do that just to pad the word count, but for our purposes, it’s enough to say that by the late twenty-tens, internet and mobile banking (primarily through debit and credit cards) already made up a pretty sizable chunk of day-to-day purchases. And then, right at the turn of the decade, something very peculiar happened that suddenly meant that notes being circulated through a long chain of people became… undesirable, to say the least.

I suppose the way I used cash before the pandemic could have been seen as dirty, in a sense, after all, it’s something I only spend on the kind of vices my mum wouldn’t approve of. But the last couple of years have made us all painfully aware that cash is dirty in a very literal sense. The pandemic didn’t single-handedly make computer-mediated transfers of money king—Paywave and its ilk was already poised near the throne—but the virus did accelerate the change. Overnight in Aotearoa, almost no-one was accepting cash. Working in hospo, I loved this shift. It’s well known that we queers can either drive or do maths, and as someone who knows how to parallel park, not having to work out people’s change was a big win.

Of course, I wasn’t the only winner. The biggest winners were, of course, those already on top—suddenly it was imperative that even the smallest businesses have a card machine, and the EFTPOS companies’ sales teams were more than happy to help meet demand.

Now that's all great, but transactions require two parties. I rejoiced at the collapse of cash payments because I didn’t have to process them and I still got my paycheck transferred directly into my bank account at the end of the week. The same can’t be said for everyone. There is a vast range of people in Aotearoa whose primary income comes in a cash form. Luckily for the rest of polite society, these people work jobs that we don’t like thinking about anyway. Some because we’re uncomfortable thinking about our reliance on cheap labour. I’m thinking of single mums who clean houses four times as large as their own but that are inhabited by families half the size, or teens too young to be legally employed who work at local restaurants for cash rates far lower than their older colleagues. But there are also other jobs that we choose to forget about not because of our own shame, but because they are seen to be shameful in themselves; drug dealers and sex workers spring to mind. I spoke to my friend Venti who works at a popular strip club in Wellington, and gets paid out in cash, about their experiences over the course of the pandemic.

Venti told me that over the first lockdown they had the money to survive, in theory. But in reality found nowhere they could spend it as those savings were almost entirely in cash. Explaining why they preferred to keep their savings in cash, Venti generously described the IRD as “not always sex worker friendly.” Bringing that money to the bank wasn’t an option either. To the government, their cash savings didn’t count as income, but depositing it into Venti’s bank account would qualify it as such at the moment of transferral, making them ineligible for government support, even though they were unable to work because of the pandemic. So, it turns out, it’s not just me that thinks of cash as little more than an original less authentic than its digital copy. Even in the midst of a global pandemic the state itself could only assess issues of income and personal finance through the lens of digital banking. 

Covid-19 brought on other changes too. When I asked Venti about ‘funny money,’ the fake dollar bills used in place of real cash in some strip clubs, I was preparing to write another paragraph reflecting on a hierarchy of mediated currencies. Instead, they brought my attention back to something I mentioned earlier. Money is dirty. Venti told me that even though workers get to keep 100% of cash tips, they personally preferred the funny money because, “In terms of Covid [...] at least I know it gets cleaned by the club.”

Moving away from the pandemic, if that’s at all possible anymore, the proliferation of mediated currency has also paved the way for a number of new developments. Where digital banking aimed to make the functions of a brick and mortar bank available to anyone, anywhere, a rash of new apps aim to do the same for the stock market. These apps, like Robinhood and Sharesies, targeted a particular type of guy. The kind of guy who thinks that the message of The Wolf of Wall Street is “Wow, Jordan Belfort is really cool!” These apps prey on wannabe hustlers and grinders, promising them a slice of the fortune made (and lost) daily in stock trading halls around the world. Though in reality, they are little more than gambling apps that swap the aesthetics of sports betting for the more refined, but equally masculine, aesthetics of the world of finance.

So money is becoming more and more abstracted from physical cash, adding layer upon layer of mediation, what does all this mean for us? Economically? Fuck knows! Like I said, I stuck to the humanities because I’m bad at maths. Socially, though? Well, I still have no idea, but if stock trading apps, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the amount of people still left behind by the digitisation of money are anything to go by, it’s not gonna be good.