Another week, another bank branch closure has been announced in Tameside.
The Barclays branch in the Arcades, Ashton, will close its doors to customers for the final time in mid-October, and it's been claimed in a statement that "fewer than 10 customers use this branch regularly as the only way to do their banking". If you want to visit a Barclays bank branch, you'll soon have to make a trip to Stockport. At least it has a decent HMV, I guess.
I remember the days when you could actually call up your local branch on a local number, rather than having to go through an endlessly frustrating call centre, and the branch manager knew a lot of customers by name. These days, with everything on smartphone apps, it does all feel pretty impersonal. It's all well and good, until the internet goes down. I always carried cash in my wallet until 2020, when the pandemic hit. I think that was the moment that changed the way I did things, and nowadays I'm much more likely to tap my card when out and about in shops, at the bar or the cinema.
I overheard a conversation in my local greengrocers the other day between two staff, and they were discussing how they love customers paying by cash. It means a bit more money in their till, and avoids them having to pay bank charges on each transaction, which I guess add up over the course of the week. Although some small shops still set a minimum transaction amount of £3 or £5, a lot of places now let you pay for a bottle of water or a Freddo by card, and those processing fees must make the banks a fortune, all whilst they are merrily shutting down branches.
The ditching of cash as a way to pay is gathering pace, with many bars and other hospitality venues now going cashless. All well and good, but I worry that some older customers are being left behind by the speed of the contactless juggernaut. The Observer had a good piece about this recently, citing the case of a Portuguese tourist who came to the UK with sterling exchanged at a decent rate, only to find he wasn't able to spend it at many of the places he visited. This resulted in unwanted charges from his bank in Portugal, and cost him 85 Euros in extra fees.
According to UK Finance, almost half of all payments were made using debit cards in 2021, and some are predicting cash may be completely wiped out within a decade. Another forecast reckons it will only make up 6% of transactions by 2031.Tourists, older people, those on a low income, and those who want to keep better track of their spending (whilst not having every transaction tracked) are all groups who may favour keeping notes and coins. And what about 2p falls at the seaside?!
Joking aside,a lot will argue that it's just progress, but I personally think cash should always be available as a choice for as long as people want to use it. I'm sad to see big town centres being left without a single bank branch. I worry it's leaving some people behind, as some simply prefer to do these things face-to-face with a real human.
The UK is leading the charge towards card domination, with Germany and Italy still showing high levels of cash usage. Withdrawals from ATMs in some parts of London have reportedly fallen by 60% in the four years to May 2022, according to figures from Link, who look after the cash machine network. Don't get me started on those holes in the wall that charge us for access to our own money. That is worse than having to pay to inflate your tyres at the petrol station.
My Fitbit apparently allows you to make payments, but I think I'll stick to using that for counting my always-slightly-fewer-than-I-thought step totals and monitoring my shameful sleep totals. I might move back towards using cash more, just to be slightly awkward. Perhaps more of us should do the same, and help local businesses keep more of our pound in their pockets, and not the banking fatcats.
