YOUR MONEY IS NO GOOD HERE
Courier-Post, Cherry Hill, N.J.
Published: 12/17/2000

A day comes when you realize that, over time and without being aware of it, you have become accustomed to something ridiculous. For Ann Coyle of Audubon, that was the day she tried to buy a $40 gift certificate at Cherry Hill Mall.

She fought through the crowds to the right sales desk and, as these stories inevitably go, couldn't get what she wanted - or do much of anything else except stand there yelling to an indifferent world - because she had foolishly neglected to bring the right method of payment. She only had cash.

It turns out the mall's management doesn't want their clerk sitting there with thousands and thousands of dollars in cash at an open desk in the middle of the friggin' mall.

"They said, `We just promote VISA and MasterCard, and no cash,'" Coyle said. "I yelled, `No cash at Christmas?!'"

Nope. No cash at the airport ticket counter either, or the rent-a-car agency, or the Federal Express office. Think about all the things you can't buy with cash anymore. Try paying your rent with it, or placing a down payment on a house, or even getting bilked by a phone psychic.

By 1995, 90 percent of all transactions in the United States were being made electronically, according to Glyn Davies' A History of Money From Ancient Times to the Present Day. This could mean the end of dollar bills, which have been conveniently anonymous, untraceable units of currency that have allowed us to buy things without forever after receiving junk mail in which our names are misspelled in exactly the same way they were when that guy at Hooters wrote us a receipt.

But every kind of currency becomes extinct after awhile. I remember how upset I was when they wouldn't let me barter a pig to get in the movies. And various primitive cultures have used and later rejected currency consisting of shells, eggs, feathers, whales' teeth, vodka and access to George Lucas.

We are merely following a trend in which money has gotten lighter and lighter, so that now it doesn't weigh anything. Suppose you use electronic cash to download a game off the Internet. What has materially changed hands? One computer subtracts a number, another one adds the same number. Why, if you could just break into the right computer, you could add a number, and there you are. In jail. With me. Doesn't work, does it.

The trend has been fairly consistent, as we see in the following brief history of money:

  • c. 3000 - c. 2000 BC. Banking is actually invented before coins are, as are loans, transfers and labyrinthine systems of phone mail. In ancient Babylonia, temples and palaces provide safe places for the storage of grain, cattle and other valuables. Banking continued in Egypt, then Medieval Europe, then Fleet Bank, where it died.

  • c. 1792 - c. 1750 BC. The Code of Hammurabi in Babylon includes laws governing banking operations. It also commands that on Thursdays, the staff gets pizza.

  • 687 BC. The Lydians of Asia Minor mint the first coins. But coins fail to catch on at first because they bear unpopular likeness of Susan B. Anthony.

  • c. 30 AD. Christ drives the money changers out of the Temple in Jerusalem. Later that year, he also drives the Hirshman's out of the temple when he tries gently pointing out that Mrs. Hirshman's cinnamon babka is store-bought. The money changers are never to return to the temple, though they do get the new gym at the JCC named after them.

  • 1532. Pizarro lands in Peru, and discovers that Incas do not use money. Their rigid state planning structure makes monetary units superfluous. Since our own economy allows us to survive without visible currency, soon we will be able to boast that we are just like the Incas. Say, what are they up to now, anyway?

  • 1800. The number of banks in the United States reaches 29, an increase from just four in 1790. The number would multiply many times over in the next centuries. At the moment, it is back to four.

  • 1926. Alan Greenspan is invented.

  • 1951. Diner's Club issues the first credit card. It goes to 200 customers, to use at 27 restaurants in New York. The downside is discovered 49 years later, when those 200 people start getting really tired of the same 27 restaurants.

  • 1995. Mark Twain Bank adopts DigiCash, an anonymous form of digital money developed by the cryptographer David Chaum. This is the first new form of currency in almost 50 years, and opens a vast frontier of commerce and innovation. Right now, it is being used mainly for porn.

    So currency evolves over time. Cash is tainted now because poor people apparently have access to it, and it doesn't allow the police and major corporations to look at our bills. That is why you now must first establish a permanent address, build a credit rating, and get a credit card before you buy the gift certificate to Cherry Hill Mall.

    Only then can someone finally take that certificate down to the mall and realize there's nothing there they want.

    		•