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How fondly I remember those days when you would saddle up to a vending machine and press all those different buttons and levers, hoping to get a free candy bar, or, when you actually felt like paying for something – looking up the double digit code to enter in so that it would drop your pick through the slot… Or walking into a bar, fishing a few coins out of your pocket and letting go on the pinball machine, or maybe even the jukebox if you happened to have a date in tow…
How about those times when you’d walk up to a newsstand and whip a few dollars out to buy the latest GQ and sandwich it inside a New York Times… Or even those lonely nights when you’d pop down to a convenience store to impress a cute teller with your deliberately fat money clip, as you attempted to pay for a pack of gum that you could do without…
But in 2020 that all ended.
At the beginning it seemed like a joke. A spell of Chinese flu and they wanted everybody to walk around with masks as if we were superheroes in a comic book. But we weren’t superheroes. We were super stupid and fell straight into a pandemic it almost killed-off civilization. That pandemic which was known as covid-19 fell upon an unsuspecting touchy-feely world with deadly results.
Only about a year later, in 2021, it turned out that money, that innocuous commodity that is such an integral part of our daily lives was responsible. Money, that thing that was keeps the world moving round and round was actually the main source of stopping everything dead in its tracks… It seems incomprehensible today that it actually took the researchers a full year from the outbreak in China until they figured out that money was what was actually spreading the deadly virus!!!! Money! …And to think that it could have all been avoided had businesses employed technology that was already mature and robust and readily available…
And so, 2021, came to be known as the year of contactless. Leading Epidemiologists finally discovered that the true “super infector” was actually money that was being circulated and payment means like credit cards that were being touched again and again. People were getting sick mostly by touching coins, cash, and credit cards that were going back and forth between consumers and businesses, customers and cashiers, back and forth back and forth, without realizing that they were passing on the deadly virus that ended up killing millions of people around the world.
Money was killing the world’s economies.
Obviously, commerce could not stop. Sure you could do without another mink coat or a third automobile or even a summer home but you couldn’t get by without buying a loaf of bread, water, milk, a fresh pair of underwear, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, milk and some cookies. There was no way of getting around paying. It was just that mankind was paying too high a price.
But technology was already there to save the day.
More precisely, contactless payment technologies where available, which became, overnight, the only way to pay. All of a sudden, cash and coins evaporated. People were tapping their cards, flashing their phones and keeping their hands germ-free. Contactless payments, which could have saved a lot of time, trouble and lives became the new, no, actually the only norm. today, in 2024, money – cash and coin as well as credit and debit cards have become a thing of the past. They are no longer in use and have ceased to exist!
Three years after the onset of Covid19, the memories of the pandemic have nearly completely receded from memory. Between you and I, contactless payments are way more convenient than having to fish around for those bits of metal jingling annoyingly in your pocket or having to keep track of how much cash you have on hand, or even dealing with a handful of smudgy credit cards.
To this day, researchers are still trying to figure out why it took the world so long to implement contactless payments… how may lives could have been saved had the technology been implemented sooner…
To tell you the truth though, I still kinda miss flipping out a fat money clip stuffed with hundred dollar bills… it made a much bigger impression then just flicking my Smartwatch to pay for something and walking on…
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