> One disadvantage: As a temporary visitor to Sweden, since you don’t have a personnummer, you’re fucked.
Walking through a park in Shanghai, I discovered that the many vending machines throughout the park will let you specify that you want to pay cash.
You can't actually pay cash, though; the slots that would accept it have been physically removed from the machines. The only way to get something out of one of the vending machines is to send the machine an online payment.
I'm pretty sure that for the use case where I want to receive a soda, we don't need digital payments at all. There is no need to involve the internet, because whoever gives me the soda must necessarily be in the same location where I am. The only thing wrong with the cash payment model is that someone went to special effort to disallow it.
In other digital-payments-in-China news, I just ordered some milk today from the store that is across the street from me. It's no great hardship for me to cross the street and buy the milk myself. However, the price of a third of a gallon of milk is 32 rmb. (USD $4.50). If I order it delivered, a courier will show up, buy the milk, and walk it up four flights of stairs to hand it over to me, and besides paying no delivery fee, my price per carton of milk falls to 22 rmb.
What really bothers me about this is that the bag came with a big receipt stapled to it showing that the delivery service paid the store 26 rmb per carton of milk. So the service was nice enough to cover the courier's fee for me at the same time that they paid me for everything I ordered through them.
Something somewhere is orchestrating a huge forced push for online payment. The economics clearly do not work on their own.
Walking through a park in Shanghai, I discovered that the many vending machines throughout the park will let you specify that you want to pay cash.
You can't actually pay cash, though; the slots that would accept it have been physically removed from the machines. The only way to get something out of one of the vending machines is to send the machine an online payment.