Roland Perry writes:
I wonder how many retail businesses accept only plastic ?

It's quite difficult to buy airline tickets with cash
(notwithstanding the alarms bells that would ring at Homeland
Security). My lawyer and realtor don't accept cash, and I've often
encountered railway ticket vending machines where the banknote
facility was broken, and only cards would work.

I suspect it's pretty location specific.

Japan (where I live) is still very much cash-based, for instance.
Retail acceptance of credit-cards in Japan is much broader than it was
15 years ago, but people using them are still very much "the
exception." It feels verrry different than the U.S., for instance,
where scads of people do stuff like use a CC/DC to buy their morning
coffee, newspaper, stick of gum.... :/

[I'm not sure if it's connected, but Japanese CCs are also _much_
stingier about extending credit past the end of the month -- you
_can't_ just decide to pay off your card bill a bit more slowly if you
realize you're a bit skint this month; if you don't pay off in full,
you risk losing your card (you can get extended payment periods, but
you must explicitly arrange them in advance). In the U.S., by
contrast, people routinely extend payment of their card bill over long
periods of time; this isn't financially very sensible of course, but I
think the ability to do it does give people a feeling of security, and
probably greatly helped popularize CCs...]

-Miles

--
Ocean, n. A body of water covering seven-tenths of a world designed for Man -
who has no gills.