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Time as a cost

The Bank of Canada published an interesting working paper on retail payment transaction times ("How Long Does It Take You to Pay? A Duration Study of Canadian Retail Transaction Payment Times", Working Paper 2018-46, September 2018). The author finds that "cash is more efficient in terms of time than cards, allowing for the processing of more payments... it helps explain the continued use of cash to pay for low-value retail purchases, despite the increase in payment innovations. This is a useful contribution to the discussion about cashlessness and I was thinking about it when I went to the fish and chip shop recently. Now, I haven't used cash in the fish and chip shop for years. Like most normal people, I pay by contactless, and it seems pretty quick to me, even allowing for the time taken for online authorisation. So while I was waiting for the haddock and chips, I watched the couple of people behind me in the queue. One used contactless but the other used a £10 note, which meant that the .

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