Trying to stay current with 21st-century currency at the coffee house

Because we hadn’t had any coffee yet, we pulled into a Starbucks on the way to work on Wednesday. We always go inside because we’ve hated ordering through intercoms ever since Jack-in-the-Box started using them decades ago, igniting our childhood fear of clowns.

We ordered something that’s not on the menu anymore because it makes us feel superior to the other people in line, then, for some reason — perhaps because we hadn’t had any coffee yet — we pulled a $10 bill out of our wallet.

We haven’t paid cash at Starbucks for years. We’ve always used our credit card, which is throwback enough as it is because most people use the Starbucks app instead of credit cards. Even as we were handing the old sawbuck to the barista, we realized we were behaving like an old man. Maybe one on a fixed income (although fixed comfortably enough to pay $4.75 for a cup of exotically named coffee drink) who pulled the $10 out of a cigar box kept hidden in the freezer.

Our barista paused for a moment as if trying to recall the protocol involved with cash. She pulled open a drawer like the one where your grandma kept spools of thread, bits of hard candy and old automobile keys in the kitchen, and counted out our change.

Throughout our life, financial experts have predicted that the day would come when no one would carry cash anymore, and that day is basically here for millions of people. We’ve stood in line in convenience stores and waited for people to using their debit cards to buy a Slurpee or a Slim Jim. We don’t go quite that far, but our little Starbucks experience made us realize how seldom we use cold, hard cash these days.

To some extent, we’ve used cash alteatives all our life, from back in the days when cereal box tops were currency, or Blue Chip stamps, Park’s Texaco coupons and Skee-Ball premiums. Checks, for that matter, have largely fallen from use, even in paying bills, which most people do through automatic payment.

When we were a young boy and working at our granddad’s formal wear shop in Bixby Knolls, most transactions were made in cash, some by check and occasionally some big shot would use a credit card, which entailed us having to take out the clunky, steampunk credit-card machine and make a phone call to make sure the user had the dough to back it up.

Soon after, credit cards and checks passed cash (except in grocery stores, which didn’t take credit cards until the late 1980s and early 1990s).

Now, with e-commerce (making purchases on the Inteet) firmly part of the shopping experience, with m-commerce (e-commerce conducted on a mobile device, such as you might do via an Uber or Starbucks app) rapidly catching up, credit cards are begiing to become as quaint as your dead presidents. Lumped together, they’re what we use instead of wampum and bits of colored glass in the 21st century.

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We told our barista at Starbucks that we felt like an old man as we accepted the change she fished out of the drawer. She laughed and said, “I know! Who uses cash anymore?”

We stuffed a bill with George Washington’s picture on it in her tip jar. It’s still considered currency at participating stores.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.