Cashlessness: “Young people use cash relatively little. They use it to buy marijuana.”

I suppose Gahan and Duggins can rig up some sort of Square.

STEINBERG: A bakery that wants your dollars but not your dough, by Neil Steinberg (Chicago Sun-Times)

 ... I would feel naked without money, wouldn’t leave home without some. The fear being that I would encounter places that don’t take credit cards. When exactly the opposite is increasingly true: businesses are beginning to no longer accept hard money.

“THE GODDESS IS GOING CASHLESS ON AUGUST 1st” read signs on the revolving door of the Goddess and the Baker at LaSalle and Wacker, an upscale coffee bar and sandwich shop that on Tuesday stopped accepting dough for its products (completely legal — no laws require a business accept cash).

“We’ve had theft, and we’ve had robbery,” she said. “There’s an increase in counterfeit dollars. The time supervisors take to count money, between shifts, after shifts, getting money to the bank, paying for an armored car service. Then there are hygiene reasons. Our cashiers touching money and then touching baked goods.”

You already know the conclusion.

 ... technology wins, and expect cash to vanish along with the internal combustion engine. In a sense, this is a dream come true for me. I always resented that we as a society couldn’t get rid of the penny. Now we can, though we have to also scrap all coinage and currency while we’re at it.