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Remember when Cash was King?
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Remember when Cash was King?
 I’ve been watching those VISA commercials lately—the ones that try and make you ashamed of using cash. Every time I see one I remember when I was small. Back then, Cash was King—it was a motto heard everywhere from car lots to groceries. These days, if you believe the VISA ads, cash is a doddering old fool, hanging around and getting in the way of the younger, sleeker, smarter generation. I empathize with cash.  Granted, cash isn’t what it was then, not by a tenth. When I was 8, it was 1962, and you could buy one of those cute six-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola™ for six cents. They were really a nickel. The extra penny was the bottle deposit, and that was added value: My best friend, Nancy, and I would walk to Mac’s, a little store about a mile from our houses on the north side of Tulsa, at least once a week. We never had any money, but we went to Mac’s anyway, knowing that along the way we could easily pick up enough pop bottles from the ditches to pay for a couple of sodas—Big Red™ for her, Nehi™ grape for me. Sometimes we had enough left over to buy a Hershey™ bar. They were a nickel then, and the bars were bigger than they are now. We’d drink our sodas on the walk back home, giving ourselves red and purple mustaches and stitches in our sides. Then, in a perfect illustration of 8-year-old logic, we’d throw the bottles into the ditch. We could have taken them home and saved them for the next week, but we never did, we just picked them up the next time we walked to Mac’s. But back to those VISA commercials: In them, bright pop music plays and well-choreographed customers twirl about in a flower shop, a doughnut shop, a food court, making their choices, passing their VISA cards over a reader (an aside here—maybe there are other cards and other readers that let you do it that quickly, but I always have to push a lot of buttons when I use my VISA credit/debit card). Anyway, the happy shoppers all waltz away with their goods in a fast-paced, never-ceasing dance of commerce, until someone made up and dressed to look like a yokel, clod or ass starts fumbling out cash, stopping the dance and getting dirty looks from the cashier and the other shoppers. In the food court ad, everyone in line behind the cash-carrying goober dances over to another line, suggesting that shops will lose business if they let people give them cash.  Maybe those TV shopkeepers should hang up signs that say, “Plastic only,” or “Your Money Not Welcome Here.” When I was young, people used cash for everything. They even mailed cash sometimes, to pay bills. If you didn’t have a stamp, you could clip a coin to the envelope when you put it in your mailbox, and the people at the post office would put a stamp on it for you. We trusted one another more then, and we were more trustworthy—do you think the two things are connected? Sometime in the mid-sixties, my parents got a MasterCard™. It was a big deal. They studied the card closely, and read all the literature that came with it. Neighbors and relatives admired it. I don’t know how many years it was before they used it. I think they were a little afraid of it. Turns out, they were right. I have cards. I use cards. But I maintain my right to use cash when I want to. The shopkeepers I know not only still accept cash, I suspect they don’t really mind it at all. Except for those misbegotten dollar coins.  
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