Embracing the old to usher in the new
Maybe some of the old ways were better?
How’s everyone doing? Kinda terrible? Same, same. With the onslaught of terrible news pouring in daily, I confess I’ve partially taken a head-in-the-sand approach. Yesterday I tuned into NPR’s Morning Edition and something clicked. It felt like the right news format for right now. Yes, the line-up was mostly terrible news, but each item was short, digestible and not formatted to spark outrage like so much of our media seems to be today. It had a finite beginning and end. It was an old way of doing things that felt like it deserved revisiting.
It’s one of several “old” things that I find myself embracing right now. Like many people, I’m feeling the siren call to log out of Instagram once and for all. I’ve (mostly) avoided shopping on Amazon for five years (a topic I might write about someday). But I struggled to give up buying digital books for my Kindle. Now that my neighborhood finally has a bookstore, I’ll order books there when I can’t get a book from the library (I’ll still borrow digital books through Libby).
Here’s another small way to challenge the status quo by doing something old: Pay cash.
I know most people have completely given up paper currency1 (much like listening to the radio), but I love cash for so many reasons. It forces you to shop locally and keeps more money in our communities. For many people, it’s a surefire way to make you more aware of your spending, and therefore less likely to buy things you don’t need. And cash is also a tiny way to undermine both Big Banks and Big Tech. Let me explain.
Every time you pay with a credit card you’re engaged in what’s known as the four-party system (or scheme). Pay with plastic and in addition to yourself and the business you are patronizing, your credit card company and the merchant’s bank are also involved in the transaction. The merchant pays about a small percentage to the credit card company on every transaction. Individuals pay banks through all kinds of fees they can accrue. Layer in an app like Seamless or GrubHub (who take approximately 12 to 18 percent of an order) and you’ve got two more parties (the app and their bank) at the party. This all adds up to more costs for you, the buyer.
As Julio Vincent Gambuto writes in Please, Unsubscribe, Thanks!, “What you’re actually doing is shooting money up the ladder, one late, cold pizza at a time.... If you walk down and pay the restaurant cash, five other parties would lose out on money. Is it any wonder that speedy fifteen-minute delivery services abound and that there is a deluge of marketing for them nearly everywhere you turn?”
Additionally, cash is private. When you pay in cash, Big Tech can’t track what you’re spending. They also can’t sell data they don’t have. Likewise, you’ll never get a notice of a data breach from a business you patronize with cash.
Paying cash also has secondary benefits. For example, when my family doesn’t want to cook we don’t log into an app to order delivery. Instead, we walk to our favorite Indian restaurant. It’s cheaper than delivery, we’re actually eating sooner, and our food is hot when we get it. Plus, the owners of a local business get every penny of the money we spend. Likewise, if I head to the funky neighborhood art shop to buy a package of envelopes instead of ordering them on Amazon, it helps ensure that that business will stay in operation and reduces so much shipping packaging waste. Sometimes, paying cash can help you negotiate a lower rate.
Cash is also censorship resistant. This is not necessarily relevant today, but it’s easy to imagine a dystopian future where your financial transactions could be used against you or in which financial institutions even forbid certain transactions. Keeping a cash culture alive is good for democracy.
Shopping locally and paying cash isn’t going to change the world, but they are small ways we can stop moving forward with the status quo on autopilot. I think that making a series of these habit shifts could add up to real change. What are some ways you’re doing things differently? Are there any “old” habits you’ve adopted? I’d love to hear in the comments.
If this piques your curiosity, you might enjoy the writing of
of the newsletter As If We Were Staying, who has been writing about how we can grow a regenerative economy. I love his proposal to replace the word “resistance” with “resilience.”Related reading from Living Small:
3 More Things
The best small space story I read last week was about Toronto’s embrace of ADUs in The New York Times (gift link). I’m a big fan of this type of urban infill and especially when it allows for multi-generational living. Plus, this 750-square foot Brooklyn Heights rental was pretty cute.
Writing: Last week I sent out the first dispatch of my gardening newsletter Living Landscapes. I’ve also written a couple of fun stories for Gardenista recently: One about a front yard food forest designed by Pine House Edible Gardens in California and another about garden designer Kelly D. Norris’s excellent new book Your Natural Garden.
Subscribing: Trust me, this will be good.
Thank you for reading. Next week we’ll have the latest edition of Small Takes.
But what about my points? Maybe it’s because I don’t spend or travel enough (I’m frugal!), but I cannot see the value in paying for a premium card or chasing rewards dollars. If that’s your jam, that’s cool, but if there’s a local business you love, consider making an exception to help send a little more money their way.
Another way to abandon Amazon and Apple and all the big corps: Bookshop.org just launched ebooks! So now we can get ebooks that support independent bookstores. Not an old way, but probably a better way to do a new thing!
It sounds kind of silly to say this, because it feels like such a small thing, but I've been going for walks without my phone. I've never been a big podcast or chatting on the phone person, but just the weight of it in my pocket was distracting enough on walks. If I got a text, I would check it immediately, even if it wasn't important, or if I saw a pretty bird I would take a picture even though I have 1,000 similar photos already. Without my phone, it's just me, the birds, the lake, and the trees, and I find that I pay attention to everything more when I don't have a possible distraction sitting in my pocket.