Over the last decade all kinds of new efforts to get people to change the way they pay for things have arisen. We have covered many of them here. But this article appearing in Bloomberg notes that, at least in the US, the use of plain old credit cards still wins out. Below are some excerpts and then an added comment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Will anything ever pry old-fashioned credit cards out of Americans’ hands?
Even as the rest of the world embraces the idea of paying for stuff with their smartphones, the U.S. is clinging to its cash and plastic -- so much so that even the nation’s biggest bank is struggling to persuade people to switch. Starting early next year, JPMorgan Chase & Co. customers will no longer be able to use the Chase Pay app to pay with their smartphones when shopping in stores, the bank said Wednesday (8-21-19)."
. . . .
"In the U.S., digital-wallet transactions represent only 5% of the $2.6 trillion market for in-person purchases and 20% online, while cards accounted for 80% of spending at physical stores and 70% online."
. . . .
"The U.S. market has been slower to develop partly because merchants have been slow to accept such payments and consumers haven’t found new options convenient enough to give up paying with cards that offer lucrative rewards."
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My added comment: The last paragraph quoted above makes a significant point in my view. It's why I use credit cards for most payments and why most everyone I know does as well. Other payment options simply are not competitive in offering sufficient rewards to get people to change engrained behavior (both merchants and end users). I talked about this a bit in this previous blog article that compared using credit cards to using Bitcoin or other similar kinds of payment options.
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