Author: /u/yddandy

I’m originally from New England, lived five years in Austin, and moved here for work just before the lockdowns started. I then spent almost a year where, aside from trips to HEB, I ordered everything I needed online.

Now I’m going out and doing things, and I’m finding that I constantly seem to need cash. In Austin, I don’t think I ever needed cash except for tips at the park-and-ride and in New England when I’d left, it’d gotten to the same way. Even the smallest mom-and-pop stores pretty much always took credit cards, as do some contractors/service people, other contractors and Craigslist people I always paid with cashless payment methods, usually Venmo. First time a contractor in Austin asked me to pay him in Venmo, I set it up in ten minutes and then found I could use it all sorts of places. My friend back in New England says she hasn’t used physical cash to pay for anything in years either.

Now in Houston I’ve run into multiple cash-only businesses (and I get that credit companies charge them 2-3%, but then, charge a credit card fee?) and contractors and Craigslist sellers are dead-set against Venmo. It seems like I run into situations where I need physical cash at least once a month, and it’s gotten to the point where, even though I absolutely hate to have cash lying around, I now make a point to keep a couple hundred in cash in my house and a hundred in my wallet.

Venmo (indeed most cashless payment methods except PayPal) are free, easy, and irreversible, making them safe for sellers. And they mean you don’t need to run to the bank to deposit cash or the ATM to get it, keep a nice record of all transactions (I have my Venmo history set to private, but love the record for myself), always worry when carrying more than $50 about getting robbed (so carrying $100 around in my wallet has been fun), plus the rona has turned me on to a full on germophobe and I now absolutely hate handling physical currency.

And obviously, the majority of what I spend in Houston is at businesses, the large majority of which do take credit cards, even mom-and-pop shops. But I’ve run into a couple that are cash-only, and I’ve yet to have a transaction with a private individual who was willing to use Venmo or anything else. Nobody really explains it (except a Craigslist scammer who had a sob story about being scammed with a forged cashier’s check and being now convinced that all other payment methods were unsafe, though it’s obvious in hindsight why he wanted cash: untraceable payments) and I don’t want to be pushy so I haven’t dared ask the reasons of people who insist on cash. It’s nonetheless baffling and frustrating to me, and where it’s been excessively inconvenient to pay cash, I’ve even decided not to go though with the transaction at all.

Is there some big cultural difference here compared to Austin and New England that I’m missing which would explain why businesses that don’t take credit cards—even with a surcharge—seem to be more common, and why pretty much everybody who’s not a business seems so insistent on cash?