‘Handing over cold hard cash makes you think twice’: the people ditching cards in the cost of living crisis

theguardian.com:

A year ago, buying a Starbucks coffee didn’t feel “real” to Samantha Thomas. “It was just tapping,” the 41-year-old private tutor from Wigan says. “It didn’t feel like real money, it was just my card.” Nowadays, Thomas pulls out a £5 note every time she wants a hot drink. “When you’re physically handing over solid money,” she says, “it just makes you think twice.”

For the last 12 months, Thomas has been a cash-only consumer. She leaves her debit card at home when she does her weekly food shop, bringing only the budget she has allocated in notes. As a result, Thomas could “sit here and tell you to the penny” what most items in the supermarket cost. “I know that if I go to Aldi something would cost me 6p less than if I went to Asda and about 5p less than if I went to Tesco,” she says. Thomas’s “solid money” habit hasn’t just changed her attitude to Starbucks; it’s changed the way she spends and saves entirely.

Thomas is not the only one turning to cash during the cost of living crisis. In July, more than £800m in banknotes was withdrawn from Post Office counters, a 20% rise from the same month the year before. Martin Kearsley, banking director at the Post Office, told the BBC: “We’re seeing more and more people increasingly reliant on cash as the tried-and-tested way to manage a budget.”

Since records began five years ago, Post Office withdrawals have exceeded £800m only once before – and that was last Christmas, a time when a lot of cash is tucked into cards. Shortly after UK wages fell at their fastest rate in 20 years, Kearsley said it was clear that Britain is “anything but a cashless society”.

Thomas first ditched her debit card post-lockdown after she was troubled by her online spending during the pandemic, but she says