"Remember when public phones used to have an A and B button?" my in-law had asked over dinner a few nights ago.
I said that I did because the local RSM Club back home - where my sister and I used to try our luck at riding the dinner trays tabogan-style down the carpeted stairs while the grown-ups sat quietly and tried to imagine the merciful time before they had children - happened to have a public phone at the bottom.
I remember this being some time in the late 1990s, a few years before mobile phones became ubiquitous in our lives, and the club removed the big yellow telephone at the bottom of the stairs and installed a kids enclosure behind a heavy glass wall.
The A button, we discovered over dinner as my housemate Googled it on her iPhone, was to get connected before placing your call. The B button was to return any unused change after you hung up.
I found myself thinking about that as the Optus outage effectively crashed a handful of Hunter businesses and millions of Australians back to the '90s on Wednesday, one unexpected consequence of which was that, for a brief moment on the spectrum of mild frustration all the way up to "what do you mean we can't call Triple-0?", cash once again became king.
To the surprise of no one, cash payments have been on the downhill slide for years, but if you found yourself at the cafe yesterday desperately fumbling around in your pockets for a few coins you knew weren't there, you're not alone.
Cash transactions took a marked nosedive after the COVID years, so much so that the Reserve Bank noted in June that "low cash users" (people who use cash for less than one in five transactions) now account for about 72 per cent of the population.
Only a decade ago, or thereabouts, those same low cash users accounted for only around 20 per cent.
Interestingly, the RBA noted in its same survey - "Cash Use and Attitudes in Australia" (June 15, 2023) - that in the study period, it was the highest cash users who saw the steepest decline in cash use, with over-65s leading the cashless revolution, and regional areas outpacing the cities in ditching cash payments for electronic.
By the end of last year, electronic payments outstripped cash payments across all transaction sizes.
The Bank did mention that, even though cash was on a sharp decline and there was a spike in the number of Aussies without any cash in their wallets in 2022, most still carried a small amount on them. It was, however, more likely to be a larger bill, like a $50 note, which the RBA described as a possible reflection of "precautionary motives, inflation or the prominence of ATMs for accessing cash" which dispense $20s and $50s.
The numbers are of note (pun unintended, but I'm keeping it), but it's worth considering that when the lights do go out, small businesses are the first to feel the pinch when the swanky EFTPOS becomes an even swankier paperweight.
On Wednesday afternoon, as the boffins scrambled to get the Optus plug back in the wall socket, the Cessnock Plaza Newsagency - left in the dark during the outage - posted a notice to their Facebook page:
"Sadly we are one of the many businesses that rely on Optus for our internet and phone connection," it said, "which is just another reminder why cash is crucial for small businesses such as ourselves".
