Many recent visitors from the west to Asia, even to Japan, might take a while to get used to the wide-spread “cash only” habits in most transactions. Hong Kong and Singapore are probably the two most card-friendly shopping spots in Asia, and even though I still mostly use cash in Hong Kong, my motivation is to collect as many of the remaining QEII coins as I can, which I estimated to be about 1/400 I’ve handled.
North America is largely friendly to cash or cards, and the main reason I use cards there is because the addition of sales taxes often leads to unpleasant pocketfulls of change.
My surprise in Europe earlier this month is that more vendors than ever there seem to be “cards only”, especially fuel stations, toll booths, and ticket machines. In the picture below, taken in Brussels’ south station, I counted 5 machines that only took cards vs one that also took coins (and not bills, inconvenient for someone needing to buy even €15 of tickets).
Progress, for many generations, was defined and led by Europe, and then for a time, it seemed Japan, Brazil, or perhaps now China would be the country of the future. No matter how much of the rest of Asia advances, or even warms up to bitcoins, I have difficulty imagining many vendors in Asia refusing to take cash anytime soon. This is probably more a matter of custom than of law, and might also have implications for the future tax structures of these countries as well, which we should all hope are not like Europe’s…