The Pandemic Was Supposed To Kill Cash. Has The Opposite Happened?

Traveling through the Denver airport recently, I saw a sign at one of the quick service restaurants that got me thinking about how we pay for things. A few days later, I read a report from American Banker suggesting that an assumption many of us might have made about the effect of the pandemic on the usage of cash may be wrong. An article about currency usage in the UK from The Economist suggested the same puzzling conclusion, even as other reports were suggesting that usage of cash “plunged” during the pandemic. So which report is right?

Interestingly, they both are right. It turns out that cash reserves in many countries during the pandemic have become more scarce due to supply chain disruptions in producing currency. Added to that, the uncertainty of the pandemic has made many consumers more likely to hold on to cash “as a store of value rather than for near-term transactional purposes.” So, yes, cash has become harder to get AND people are using it less at the same time. It’s almost impossible to end this story without a Dad joke about there being two sides to every coin, so I’ll just leave it there.