China's Cashless Economy Threatens To Leave Its Elderly -- and Their Money -- Behind (qz.com) 105
An anonymous reader shares a report: With his cellphone in one hand, and two wooden meditation balls in the other, Zhang Siqi queued up alongside throngs of fellow retirees that make up the morning rush at a small Beijing grocery store. Zhang, a Beijing native, then opened the WeChat mobile pay tab on his phone and scanned it at the automatic register to pay for some fruit and a pack of cigarettes with a savviness that belied his age.
That cutting-edge payment method is rapidly becoming so common in Beijing and other large cities that experts have begun referring to the Chinese capital as a prototype of the futuristic cashless society. In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported, far outstripping the US. While Zhang has been using WeChat social media and mobile pay functions for a few years now, the 63-year-old knows not every Chinese senior citizen is equally adept.
"Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps," he said, pocketing his phone with his right hand, and rolling the wooden meditation balls with his left. Those issues were brought into sharp focus recently by a viral video of an older Chinese patron in northern China arguing with the staff at the checkout of a supermarket in northern China over how to pay for a bag of grapes -- the staff told him he needed to pay by app, but eventually relented and allowed him to pay by cash. A slew of viewers expressed sympathy for the demoralized customer, including consultant Matthew Brennan, who writes about China's ever-evolving tech scene.
That cutting-edge payment method is rapidly becoming so common in Beijing and other large cities that experts have begun referring to the Chinese capital as a prototype of the futuristic cashless society. In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported, far outstripping the US. While Zhang has been using WeChat social media and mobile pay functions for a few years now, the 63-year-old knows not every Chinese senior citizen is equally adept.
"Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps," he said, pocketing his phone with his right hand, and rolling the wooden meditation balls with his left. Those issues were brought into sharp focus recently by a viral video of an older Chinese patron in northern China arguing with the staff at the checkout of a supermarket in northern China over how to pay for a bag of grapes -- the staff told him he needed to pay by app, but eventually relented and allowed him to pay by cash. A slew of viewers expressed sympathy for the demoralized customer, including consultant Matthew Brennan, who writes about China's ever-evolving tech scene.
f they pay for cigarettes (Score:1)
They themselves won't get that old.
Skeptical (Score:2, Interesting)
Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps
Most of them don't have a poor memory and are perfectly capable of learning new technology. Most of them just don't want to learn something new and are comfortable with old ways of doing things. As such I tend to react skeptically when older folks claim they can't handle the technology. Sometimes it's true but more often it's just laziness or disinterest.
My father is old enough to collect social security. He's a smart man and worked as an engineer and machinist for 30 years. But he's intimidated by com
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I can see in the not-so-distant future insurance companies dinging people with higher premiums for purchases they deem "inappropriate". Screw the system. Likewise, I get penalized at work for not getting the annual physical, where they want to see blood panel, weight/height/BMI, and diabestes and cholesterol panels. I refuse out of principle, and my premiums are $50 month higher. It's all about control and I simply will not play the game unless and until it is illegal to do so, and even then there will be ways around it.
As if the socialized version would be any different? It still costs money for daddy government to pay for all your diabestes panels, people just think it's free because they're economically illiterate. You think that just because it's "teh people" paying your bills that no one is going to think about cost savings? LMAO.
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Sunk cost fallacy (Score:3)
Many of us spent a long time learning to do something a certain way, and are unwilling to just throw all that time and effort away because somebody decided they had a better way that really is no better, just different.
First off please educate yourself about the sunk cost fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Second, just because you think it isn't any better does not mean your opinion is correct or widely shared. Digital payments have clear, measurable, and easily understood advantages. Yes they have disadvantages too. Your comfort with a different way of doing something is a good approximation of irrelevant if the majority of people see advantage in using a new technology.
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Sure there are advantages, the telecommunications or I guess now, the information services get more money as well as a lot of power as they can cut you off on a whim and you're more dependent on them. There are more middlemen getting rich by taking a cut from your purchases. People like Zuckerburg can become richer. Employers, landlords and such can have more info to weed out people for daft things like not posting enough on social media. It becomes even easier for the government to spy on its citizens with
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I hope that is a typo, or you're renting out mansions as a 2 million a year income to rent the average place seems a bit high. Even at 4x and a really cheap place means making well over a hundred grand a year, at least around here.
Anyways, I was thinking of the more institutionalized rental companies rather then individuals.
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Can you give us a decent list of all these so called advantages (for myself as a consumer)?
Aside from convenience, I really can't think of many benefits to myself.
On the other hand, I can think of a LOT of advantages to corporations, and the government, which generally do NOT benefit me.
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You do know that the ability to learn and retain new information slowly fades as you get older and the brain gets more and more set in its ways, right? That's why it's a lot easier for kids to learn a second language than it is for adults.
That does not mean adults can't learn a new language - just that it is more difficult. At some point the difficulty of learning something over the perceived benefit of having learned it leads to an equation where people go, "Fuck it, I'm too old for this shit." I strongly
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That's why it's a lot easier for kids to learn a second language than it is for adults.
That is not a good analogy. The brains of children appear to be preprogrammed to rapidly assimilate language, and that preprogramming fades with time. Language learning is a special case, and learning other topics does not have the same fade out.
My Chinese father-in-law is 87, and has no problem at all using WeChat-Pay. Click the icon to open the app, scan the QR-code, and click "Ok". It is dead simple. They amount to be charged is in big digits about 12mm high, that are easy to read. It is faster, ea
Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, you think mobile payments will give the Chinese Government full control? They already use physical force to do that. Like, maybe an actress disappearing for months, and then coming back and saying how tax evasion is horrible. Or the head of INTERPOL just disappearing. Or US citizens getting detained to encourage their parents to return to China.
Look, China is a totalitarian state. Mobile payments aren't really an effective "stand up to the man" thing.
And if they were, the old people remember
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Be much better in the west where it'll give the information services (who luckily got rid of that horrible requirement to serve everyone eqully that they had as telecommunications services) full control, along with whoever they share it with, such as your employer, your insurance provider, the government who won't be limited by that piece of paper called a Bill of Rights and anyone else willing to pay
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When you see one person 'getting it' quickly and another struggling or not getting it, chances are the former already knows the language/metaphor and is essentially just learning a new lexicon, while the later has to learn the metaphor from scratch. I see this all the time when dealing with people who grew up on
People don't become idiots (Score:2)
You do know that the ability to learn and retain new information slowly fades as you get older and the brain gets more and more set in its ways, right?
Certainly. That doesn't mean people become blithering idiots the moment they turn 60. Just because they aren't at the peak of their mental abilities doesn't mean they are incapable of learning anything new.
That's why it's a lot easier for kids to learn a second language than it is for adults.
Learning how to send an email or use a digital payment system is a FAR cry from learning an entire new language. Adults are routinely better at absorbing new material than children are. I defy you to find a 10 year old who could handle the many and various responsibilities and unexpected problems that
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My town has a high percentage of chrono-Americans. In stores, the young nose rings in cashier positions all know me as being the only customer my age who uses Apple Pay.
Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
C) one does not need to grow up with a technology to understand and master it - to claim otherwise is the most pathetic of excuses.
Or maybe that's just your excuse for the crappy nature of most mobile software, none of which have standards for interfaces (which would allow for transferability of skills) or very good interfaces at all. Add to this the fact that mobile usage is driving out deaktop as a dominant mode of interaction with the net (which because of the shift in UI, obviates the last set of N standards the elderly may have learned) and you can see why most (old) people are not too enamored with learning new tech. What's the point of learning something if the information isn't usable after that point in time?
In short, don't blame the elderly for not wanting to put up with the churn - blame the industry for not making it easy for them to use the tech in the way they probably have learned to use it..
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Feigning incompetence to mask disinterest (Score:2)
Maybe your cousin didn't WANT to use the social media crap, and was basically saying: call me, text me, or fuck the fuck off.
My cousin's complaints had nothing to do with me. She was complaining because she had to learn something new so she could follow her children's exploits on Facebook and elsewhere. She was pretending incompetence when in fact the reality was that she lacked interest.
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Your anecdotal evidence is not a statistical indication of the elderly's ability or lack there of. My own anecdotal evidence in dealing with three elderly (mom and in laws) is mixed. I've mentored them through things that I learned myself (and I'm 60, but have been in tech since the 70s) They have various issues such as carpel tunnel and arthritis that make it difficult to use a touch screen. I'd suggest you read this and the issues pointed out during the study..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
YES! (Score:1)
YES! I want to be tracked in everything I do. All Americans should be desiring and willing to be tracked like this! It makes life so much easier and remember what that great Nazi spokesman Joseph Goebbels said, 'If you have nothing to hide, you ave nothing to fear!'.
It's so sweet that they think of the elderly first (Score:4, Interesting)
instead of the implications of government access to the data of trillions of dollars of transactions Chinese "citizens" make.
From the package of grapes, to the pregnancy tests, foreign purchases... everything purchased will be categorized, and probably calculated into your social media scores.
Not a bit terrifying?
Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
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From the package of grapes, to the pregnancy tests, foreign purchases... everything purchased will be categorized, and probably calculated into your social media scores.
Not a bit terrifying?
The terrifying bit is when the government limits your ability to buy food based on your social credit score. Criticize the government? Let's see how you do without food for a month.
They already do this with access to public transport, which is many people's only way of getting to work.
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Not much different then the only information services company in your area cuts you off so you can't buy groceries, though I guess being a company makes it fine as their freedom is more important then you eating.
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Man, WTF? Does your ISP send you at gunpoint to a forced labor camp? Does it have mobile execution vans for its convenience? Can it actually in any way stop you from buying groceries? Your false equivalence is such obvious BS. (Plus, you know there are also big companies in China complicit in this shit, right? It's not an either-or.)
OK, I'm assuming you're just an idiot, but maybe I've got the wrong end of this: even though because you're posting with a low UID, you could still be working for the Chi
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It's the direction that we seem to be going. Sure the Chinese are leading, but there are totalitarians in every country and they're usually successful, due to not giving a shit about others. As for how far companies can go, research the E. India Company or some of the companies in 19th century America, who did work with the government to have camps, though not like the prison industry has now, and didn't care about executing people who were in their way or disobedient. Of course these people were usually th
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In the West, it is the banks that keeps tabs on you.
They don't like cash because they can't make a profit on it.
If they don't like you, you get your bank account frozen.
Confucianism (Score:2)
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Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
Honestly, they don't need to. Americans think electronic payments cost 2-3% like VISA, MasterCard, AmEx etc. charge because they bake in fraud protection, insurance, credit, kickbacks etc. and a solid profit margin but in reality an plain debit electronic transaction is super cheap. Here in Norway the national system (BankAxept) charges $0.015 to $0.03 per transaction depending on unit volume. And no, I don't mean percent I mean $15-30 per 1000 sales. All companies that pay their taxes lose money on cash ha
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Using cash for transactions will soon become illegal.
As I frequently say, obsolete technology does not need to be banned. When the powers that be are trying to stomp out the old ways by force, you know whatever excuses they're using are bullshit.
One thing is certain... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...someone will ALWAYS figure out how to take money from you. This is the biggest non-problem on the planet.
Unless doing so is more expensive than what they're taking from you. Not having cash means less of a target for robbery, not having to pay someone to pick it up or take it to the bank, less time figuring change, self-checkouts without unreliable cash-handling machinery, etc.
If you only have $200/day in cash transactions, it probably costs you more to deal with cash than you're going to make in profit. Especially for low-margin businesses like groceries.
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The robbery just moves to a different venue as the hackers bleed you dry after stealing your identity.
Cashless society = Surveilance society (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cashless society = Surveilance society (Score:5, Insightful)
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To put it bluntly: no, they are not.
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That's part of the plot of "1984": your devices monitor you. Many Chinese would read such a book and go, "So? That's the way things are. Don't anger Big Brother and everything is fine."
It actually mirrors Chinese family structure in many ways; "the family" is always watching you and everything you do must be approved by "the family". 1984's "Big Brother" is merely a larger scale of the same thing. I'm not saying every family is like that, but it's generally the rule. Remember in the flick, "Crazy Rich Asia
I'm guilty of it, but it's not good (Score:4, Insightful)
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CASHLESS, means EVERYTHING you purchase, EVERYTHING you earn is noted by "the government".
Once this globe falls into the one world order, with EVERYTHING controlled by the imperial United Nations
(or whatever they call it), ANYTHING you attempt to purchase, will be approved or denied by the global
rulers.
Hard currency, be it gold, barter or whatever, keep the governments nose OUT of your business.
Cashless is touted now as "secure & convenient" which is just a ruse to get you to give up more of
your privacy.
There also might be a simpler explanation, which is cheaper for banks and governments, cash or cashless?
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No, it's about the tracking. China's fledgling IRS (and I call it fledgling, because just 10 years ago they had really no ability to track income for just about anyone or any entity) loves this.
They're using the WeChat mobile pay data to find out that Xiang's corner grocery claimed it only sold 430,000 RMB of product last year, but had 2,430,000 in WeChat payments. Xiaoyan claimed she only received payments from her 20 RMB/hour office wage, but now they see she received another 600,000 RMB from her boss.
I
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Credit cards charge a fee that raises the price of everything you buy. Pay-by-app, at least for WeChat-pay and Ali-Pay, charges no fee.
Anyone who can't remember to charge their phone, is just as likely to forget or lose their CC.
These payment systems can use either Wifi or the cellular network. Both are very reliable in China.
CC fraud is a huge problem. Pay-by-app fraud is nearly nonexistent.
Peer-to-peer payments are easy with the apps. Impossible with CCs.
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WeChat Pay and Alipay both charge [financefeeds.com] once you get above a relatively low limit (1000 RMB). Both also sit on your funds for 7 to 14 days, longer than Visa or Mastercard, or even UnionPay or Peony.
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Anyone who can't remember to charge their phone, is just as likely to forget or lose their CC.
No they are not because paying by phone requires two things :-
1) To charge the phone beforehand
2) To take the phone with you
OTOH paying by credit card requires only one thing :-
1) To take the card with you
Moreover, I have the habit of checking by feel when I leave the house that my card wallet and phone are in my pocket. But I can't check the state of charge of my phone that way, and in any case even if I look at it, the little battery state icon on my phone goes from full to empty
Cashless Society = Negative Interest Bank Account (Score:1)
If there ever was a globalist banker scheme, this would be it.
Cash is king.
That sounds fishy (Score:2)
"In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported...". China's nominal GDP is $12.24 trillion. And the statistic claims $15 trillion was made in Mobile payments! Gas.
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Cashless society is everywhere (Score:2)
I do this in Canada for a couple of years now, pay everything with my phone: gas, groceries, drug stores, dollar store, hardware store, costco, corner store, name it. The only stores I know that don't accept pay pass are Wal-Mart and Michaels, in Canada.
In the USA it is pretty retarted, maybe they are 40 years late compared to Europe. There is a lot of place in the USA where you still use your magnetic strip, or that even if you use a chip+PIN or pay pass, the cashier still asks for your signature, they don
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"In the USA it is pretty retarded, maybe they are 40 years late compared to Europe."
Last thing I read on the subject about the reason it takes so long to make the change is:
1) The size of the thing
2) The cost of the thing
With #2 being the primary point of contention. Estimates are around the ~$8-10B mark and there is some disagreement over who is going to foot that bill.
( CC industry, banks, etc )
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:PINs are socially unacceptable on credit cards,because they are associated with (low-class) debit cards. With an excellent chargeback system and no liability, no one really cared about magnetic strip (and still doesn't care about signature), because the penalty for fraud is not ont he customer or the credit card company (it's on the poor merchant). In fact, the CC company charges the merchant a fine, so they love chargebacks. The change only happened when the retailers started losing CC numbers by the m
Foreshadowing of what we'll see in America, IMO .. (Score:2)
Already, there are restaurants in places like New York City that won't accept cash. They demand debit cards, credit cards or something like Apple or Android Pay, only. Their reasoning is an interest in reducing crime. (You won't get very far trying to wave a gun at them and demanding all the cash in the register.) I'm sure, secondarily, there's the advantage of fewer errors from employees making incorrect change or accidentally accepting counterfeit bills. And obviously, it saves some of the hassle of mak
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Perhaps the Chinese Elderly (Score:2)
are wise enough not to trust an " app " ( which has public or private permissions to access who knows what on your phone ) which runs on an untrustworthy platform ( smartphone ) which has the means to access a bank account or credit card in your name.
Perhaps they have enough wisdom to see what sort of hard-on the Chinese Government gets from being able to track / watch every single financial transaction in real time. Couple this with their much touted " Social Scoring System " and you can see where this can
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I am curious what happens when your phone gets hacked. Or damaged. Or the power is out. Network is down somewhere along the path. etc. etc.
Simple answer: the Chinese government doesn't give a damn. They don't value human life, very much so their own citizens, so why should they care at all if anyone is 'inconvenienced'? If anyone complains, they're arrested and sent to 're-education camp' for daring to criticize the government for any reason. Someone goes hungry? Tough shit. Someone doesn't get their life-saving medication on time? They've got over a billion people, why should they care? You were defective anyway, probably not a productive-eno
The Chinese government does not value human life (Score:2)
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Poor USA (Score:2)
That's over a trillion more than the total retail sales in USA. Not the biggest economy anymore.
That's just mobile spending, not cash, debit, or credit cards
"...saviness that belies his age." ... 63?! (Score:2)
WTF !!! I don't know any 60 year olds who aren't 'tech savvy'. Good grief
Re:More libtard BS on Slashdot.Org (Score:4, Informative)
Never mind how much they had contributed to society during their life time.
You know who else thought that the elderly and "unfit" were a drain on society and should be put to death? The Nazis. I'm not trying to Godwin's law you, just stating facts.
Goebbles ordered propaganda movies in an attempt to change public opinion in favour of "euthanasia".
Check out one example: Ich Klage An [imdb.com]. After the war, the cast and crew were put on trial at Nurnberg charged with crimes against humanity
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Nazis did euthanasia on the mentally retarded, and old people are basically retards, I guess you're saying?
You're doing a classic Godwin.
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In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments
Redo you calculation with the countries population in 2017 of 1.386 billion