Is the Personal Check Dead? If not, how soon will it be?

P.S. I'll be 74 in a couple of weeks.

Dale: If you have a bank with a website, you can go online to your accounts and see every transaction for every account. At my bank, I can make the payment, transfer funds between accounts, set up future regular payments and send a nice fat check to you if I so desire.

Nothing is done without a record.

Joe(Nothing)Nation

The banks have trained us to make them money. When we use plastic either we pay through service fees, or maybe interest, and, of course, the merchant pays for the right to accept cards (be it debit or charge). Sometimes a merchant figures this cost into a product and we end up paying more than if we were still a cash economy. I try to use cash or check whenever possible, especially when paying at a small business. Banks are very smart at getting a percentage of our money when we shop or pay for services, and we are numb to the experience.

Agree with you about mercenary banks. Came relatively late to credit cards and have never carried a balance, never paid any interest or fees. The card I use has a cash back feature, and in the last two years have received more from these "rewards" than from bank interest. (Or lately bank apathy..pathetic rates.)

I really don't like carrying cash, and having to physically deal with bills and coins, arthritis an issue. Don't like using ATM's, safety issue, and with the cost of everything today, I'd need to carry an amount that would make me nervous. Remembering when a $20.00 would last a week..gone are those days.

In this week's episode Joe discovers internet banking and makes merry mayhem whilst robbing Peter to pay Paul. In next week's show Joe decides he need never enter the chapel again having discovered that ATM's have more personality than a lotta tellers.

Cash out? Bless you. Eschew.

Thank you Joe, I will transmit a link of this thread to my BH who as I'm sure you will agree is much smarter than I and who is in charge of such affairs

Thank you Mame but that's not what I meant. Misunderstandings in a phone call can cause irreparable catastrophe

Well not yet anyway,

Thank you Next for your interest but I'd advise methodology leaving a record

I'll be 84 Andy in a couple of years

Hello, Green Witch (is that a city in Connecticut/// )

Why do you think it costs a small business more to take a credit card than to take cash or a personal check?
If you go into Moonene's Famous Cupcake Bakery and buy $22.16 worth of cupcakes (which in New York City is FOUR cupcakes) and you pay with a credit card, here's what happens:
The card is swiped through the reader.
The transaction is noted.\
At the end of the business day, the account is totaled, reconciled and (this is the important part) CREDITED to Moonene's bank account. The transaction charge on this is about 2% or maybe 50 cents.
~~~~
If you pay by check, Moonene has to verify with a check guarantee system that the check is good (because it is over $20.00) then physically write down on a deposit slip the amount~ $22.16~ and carry it to the bank and deposit it. It is usually credited the day after deposit but not always. If, by some chance, you are a piker and don't have the $22.16 in your account when the check is presented, Moonene is hit with an NSF charge just like you will be.

(What do you think it will cost to collect both the $22.16 and the $20.00 NSF fee from you? The moon? Yes. So, she will contact the guarantee service and make them pay both fees. That usually happens after about 30 days. If the check wasn't guaranteed, there isn't any sense chasing after the $22.16 and the $20.00 NSF fee, it will cost more in time than the forty something dollars.)

How about cash, that has to be cheaper than credit cards, right?
Wrong.
Cashiers can give you back the wrong change. Two Twenties can stick together or maybe the cashier just palms the second one and sticks it in her bra and the register is $20 short at the end of the day. <shrug>

But nevermind that: just handling the cash costs cash.
You have to count all the cash at the end of the day. All of it.
Bundle it into your deposit, write down what the deposit is and then, walk down to the bank with the deposit and WAIT in line to deposit the cash.
AND
while you are there you have to pick up some change: rolls of pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters///a couple hundred in ONES and a couple hundred in FIVES. Then walk back down the street, and RE-count all the change to make sure that the registers start off right in the morning.

Did I mention that about twice a month the bank calls and says you took in a fake One Hundred Dollar Bill?
They do, because the Cupcake place is the perfect place to dump some dough, busy on Sunday morning and the kids they have working there are making $8.85 an hour. They don't look at hundred dollar bills.

So, if I was running a small business I would ONLY take credit or debit cards, no cash///no checks////

and it would be so simple to close at night and I would NEVER have to actually go to a bank.

Joe(can you tell I have had some retail experience?)Nation

Yeah..........well, I still write a few checks when necessary. Sometimes it's just easier. But I don't know why. And I'm too old to remember that I need to know why, or if I remembered that I needed to know, I wouldn't be able to remember when I needed to write them. However, I do know that I write about 5 or 6 checks a month. But mostly, I don't.

It took me so long to get it right, I'm not going to waste the education.

That's interesting. Makes sense but I hadn't really seen it before.

Joe, there are a lot of bank fees charged to businesses for taking plastic, not just the cost kickback, and small businesses get charged more than big businesses. At the end of the year it can end up to being thousands of dollars in lost profit. It's why some gas stations give you a discount for cash and some stores will do it too, or not take charges under a certain dollar amount. I've owned a small business for years and I know many owners of small businesses who struggle with how to handle the card dilemma, most just add another 3 or 4% to items, but to stay competitive with larger stores you can't always do that. Bad checks are trivial, I think I get one a year and I've never had a fake bill, but of course I'm not in NYC. The cost of plastic is a common complaint of store owners and I will try and get back here and give you more specifics when I'm done running my business for the day.

Exactly. If a business takes a credit card or debit for payment, they have to pay EACH credit card company for the privilege. I got friendly with a motel owner in a camp once and she was explaining it to me. I also know this from travelling abroad - some countries tell you there's a 3% or whatever surcharge on your items if you use a credit card because that's what they pay.

The cost of plastic comes with its benefits. It's a give and take relationship.
Many of the businesses around where I live have stopped accepting cheques because it was being bounced a number of times, enough to raise concern for the business.

@Joe
As for cheques it won't go anywhere, not yet anyways. The older generation in my family still writes them. Home Businesses mainly accepts cheques. People who can't use cards or have no access to a computer for any number of reasons writes them.
As long there is some demand, cheques won't RIP.

Personally, I honestly cannot remember when I last wrote a cheque, or received one.

I still have to write out a personal check for the rent. Aside from that there's an occasional. For example those pillars of stupidity and laziness at Verizon failed to credit my online payment in late October. The bank account has not changed and they even show the last 4 digits when I am in their system so there shouldn't be a problem and my latest attempt did go through. I despise Verizon for things like this.

So anyway, I wrote out a check and sent it off the day after Butternut Squash and Mincemeat Pie day. Checked Monday and both the online and the check are registered as posted and credited on the account which means I'm in the clear until next month.

In the end I figure checking as it has been will last a little while longer. How long is a hard call. Probably for at least as long as there are still money orders being sold/purchased. Might be a decade or four or even a few centuries.

In the business I managed over the last fifteen years (Hardware, Electrical, Paint and Plumbing Supply), three things mattered most: 1) having what the customer needed, 2) adding on anything they might not have thought of and 3) getting them packed up and rung up.

I could kiss the first person(s) who thought up the credit card reader and the Sku/UPC. When I started in the hardware store in New York, we were still WRITING up the items and their prices, then entering them onto the register.
gah.

My dear owner, at the urging of two other employees, wanted to set a minimum on the Credit Cards. You know, put up a sign that said "No Credit Cards Under $20.00"
phhhffftt.
Our average sale was about six bucks more than that. (We sold a lot of 4Pack Light Bulbs~~$1.88 and Screws, FHP8x1-1/2~~.79.)

I said "Do some research. Do a search for how many sub-$20 sales we are taking in with Credit Cards.
(It turned out be about seven-to-ten per day out of 380-450 transactions. And about a third of them were for more the $15.00, just below the $20 threshold. )
Then, run those credit card numbers and see how many times in the past 90 days they have been used in the store and for how much?
(That turned out to be almost all of them AND the majority were for more than our average sale.)

So,,,, I said, at the risk of pissing someone off who's trying to buy a $15.99 can of paint on a credit card and who is in here four to six times over 90 days for other more expensive things, you say "Beat it, gotta meet the minimum sale."

So, we didn't put up the sign and two things happened:
1) the efficiency of the cashier lines went up (less time to process the sale) and, 2)because we had more credit card transactions, we got a lower rate from the credit card processor.

Other small businesses may be different, but don't kid yourself thinking the gas station gives you a discount for cash because the credit cards cost too much. It's because the owner can't hide the income from credit card transactions the way you can with cold, hard (easy to put in your back pocket and forget to tell the IRS and the State Tax Commission) cash.

Joe(money makes the world go around...)Nation

Should be getting a discount for credit cards, if there is to be a discount at all. How many crooks get a ski mask and a gun to steal credit card receipts, and keep in mind that some stickups go terribly wrong.

On the other hand, standing behind someone trying to figure out how to enter their pin number for a debit card can try the patience of an oyster.

What's worse is standing in line behind an old lady who has to fish around her change purse to find 87 cents and who pulls out a coin... "Is that a dime or a nickel? I know I have some pennies in here somewhere." ... puts it back, pulls out another one... and so on.

Lady, just give the girl a twenty and get some more change.