A few weeks ago, we were out and about and stopped by an Arby’s to pick up food for a sick relative. When we went to order, the cashier said their POS (point of sale) terminal modems were down and they could only accept cash.  This rarely happens, but luckily we had sufficient cash on hand to pay. It was interesting to see how many people didn’t, I’d say maybe 1 out of 4 or less had even 10-15 dollars on hand. It was a stream of people in, then out when they found out it was cash-only.

I had added paper money to my emergency check list, but never had time to get to the bank to make a withdrawal.  I finally did this, it’s something that you would definitely need even in a very short duration power loss as with windstorms or ice.  I forgot how much people have moved to electronic payments, if for some reason communications are interrupted you have NO way to pay for ANYTHING.  If there’s some sort of major outage for any reason, including a coordinated attack on comms or the electric grid, it would be catastrophic solely due to the lack of commerce let alone anything else. It’s just another thing that you don’t want to have zero reserves of.   I’m sure business would be able to conduct local transactions manually, but if you don’t have money there’s no way to make withdrawals. The banks wouldn’t be able to debit accounts without access to databases, nor would B2B work as that is all electronic. There would be a window where things would work more or less normally, but when restocking was needed it would get interesting.