i'm currently locked out of my debit card (put in pin wrong three times) so i'm cash-only right now. and in london, in the touristy bits, loads of stuff is card only? it's insane. like these businesses prefer to pay a transaction fee. in [mid-size regional uk city] half the restaurants prefer you to pay in cash, to avoid the transaction fees and presumably for tax evasion purposes.
I guess the benefits of card only are like:
keep homeless beggars out of your shop
it's faster - important if you have lots of footfall
you aren't holding cash in the shop which can get robbed
you don't have to worry about staff stealing out of the till
since few people pay by cash now, making change is becoming an obsolete skill (so it slows things down even longer as the person behind the till needs to whip out a smartphone and open a calculator app)
relatedly, i've been staying with my nan & have had to help her out setting up an account on her local government website so she can buy visitor parking vouchers. You used to be able to go into the council office and pay in cash for this. like there was a bureaucratic process obviously, but it was you go and talk to someone at the council. She's in her eighties, she's not going to learn how to use the internet lol.
