Make businesses accept cash for essentials like food, medicine, and transportation
Steps to make it happen
- Each society decides which payments are essential for daily life, such as food, medicine, trains, buses, electricity, and water.
- Shops and counters that handle these payments may not refuse bills and coins.
- Very small shops can get an exception if they offer another way to pay with cash nearby.
- Banks and others work together to keep places near people where they can take out and deposit cash.
- Each society sets up an office where people refused cash can ask for help or file a complaint.
- People who cannot use cards or phones can shop without trouble, even during blackouts and disasters.
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The proposal in detail
This proposal is a system that protects the right to use cash, but only in the situations that form the base of daily life. It covers payments that each society defines as essential: buying food, daily goods, and medicine, public transport fares, bills for electricity, gas, and water, and payments at government offices and hospital counters. Businesses that handle these payments would be required not to refuse paper money and coins, the legal currency, without a good reason. However, where the burden of handling cash or the risk of crime is large, as in a shop with very few employees or an unstaffed stand, an exception is allowed if the business offers an alternative, such as letting customers pay with cash at a nearby shop or providing a prepaid method that can be loaded with cash. Services offered only online would also be required to provide at least one way to pay with cash. Along with this, a guideline would be set to keep places to withdraw and deposit cash within a certain distance or travel time from where people live. Banks and payment companies would share the cost of keeping these places, including places where small shops can deposit their sales. Each society would set the guidelines and the scope to fit local conditions and review them regularly. An agency would be put in charge of checking that the rules are followed, receiving complaints from people who were refused cash and being able to demand improvements.
BenefitsNo one is shut out of paying, and that peace of mind stays
The biggest advantage is that people without an account or a device, and people who are not used to operating one, are not shut out of the payments they need to live, such as food, medicine, and getting around. Because a backup way to shop remains during blackouts, communication failures, and disasters, society as a whole is less likely to become fragile. Cash also leaves no record of who bought what, so for people who do not want companies or governments to know their daily shopping history, it is a way to protect privacy. Because people can see the money they have in hand, it also helps those who want to avoid overspending and gives children a chance to learn a sense of money. In addition, when a small number of businesses set the fees for electronic payments, having cash as another option makes it easier to hold back fee increases. Because the proposal is limited to payments essential for daily life, it does not stop the move toward electronic payment itself, and instead works as a minimum protection for the people who would be left behind.
DrawbacksCosts rise for businesses, and room for crime remains
The heaviest concerns for those who oppose this are cost and safety. Handling cash takes the work of counting, preparing change, carrying it to the bank, and guarding against theft, which is a heavy burden especially for small shops with thin profits. The risk of becoming a target for robbery also remains. Because cash leaves no record, it is persistently pointed out that it is easy to use for cheating on taxes and for hiding where money earned through crime came from. It is also hard to decide who pays how much to keep places to withdraw cash in each area, and in the end the cost may be passed on to all users in the form of fees. The proposal also clashes with the view that businesses should be free to decide how they accept payment and in which shops. In some regions, sending and paying money by mobile phone reaches poor people more easily than bank branches do, and some argue that putting resources into keeping cash could instead slow efforts to make electronic systems easier to use.
Learn the background
In many parts of the world, payments by card and smartphone are spreading fast. This has made life more convenient, but it has also left behind more people who can only use cash. They include people who cannot have a bank account, older people who find smartphones hard to use, people with disabilities, people with low incomes for whom fees and the cost of a device are heavy, and people who cannot open an account because of problems with identification. Also, when there is a power outage, a communication failure, a major disaster, or a cyberattack on a payment system, electronic payments can all stop at once. On top of that, as fewer people use cash, bank branches and cash machines stop paying for themselves and close, which makes cash even harder to use, a vicious circle. Once this system breaks down, it is not easy to rebuild it when it is needed. There is growing worry that cash may become effectively unusable just because of market trends, before society has had a chance to discuss and decide whether to do away with it.
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This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-15d) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes