"Trei, Peter" wrote: [...snip...]
what you said is all true but the benefit (as you pointed out) is primarily to the retailer, not the shopper. All this doesn't apply to higher-value transactions of course. > Ken, when was the last time you paid for a call from a UK > public phone with coins? > > Iirc, most British public phones no longer accept coins > (unlike in the US, where you have to search for one with > a card slot). I think I stopped putting coins in phone booths on the street about when I started carrying a mobile, which was late 1999 IIRC :-) Later than most. These days, just about wherever I am, even if I don't have a mobile, someone else does. Phone booths are on their way out for anyone who has either a job or friends. As you say, they are mostly card-only now - used to be specialised phonecards (I've used UK ones in Greece and Germany so they aren't *that* specialised) now they accept normal bank-issued credit and debit cards. I guess the changeover began in the 1980s & was more or less finished by mid-1990s. Some shops and bars have coin-operated ones. I get more trouble with buying train & bus tickets. The machines try to accept notes but almost all fail. They are the main reason I like the new higher-value coins (though of course they are nothing like the value of the pre-C20-inflation guineas and sovereigns my great-grand-parents probably weren't wealthy enough to see many of) This fits in with the thread about deployment problems. For these low-price transactions buyers prefer cash. Monopoly retailers (as phone booths were 20 years ago and railway trains of course almost always are) can dictate how they wish to be paid. If a PTT wanted you to use their own cards, you had to. Competitive retailers have to get the buyers on board. Even more off-topic "Trei, Peter" also wrote: > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED][SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > > Go and read 'Repent Harlequin! Cried the Tick-Tock Man' by PK Dick for a > > > particularly slackless society with this technology. > > Might be easier to find if you substitute Harlan Ellison as the author, > > though. > > - Sten > Mea culpa. It's been a long time since I read 'Dangerous Visions'. Must be, seeing as "Harlequin" was published in Galaxy magazine, then reprinted in Ellison's "Paingod and other Delusions", not in DV which was an original-story-only anthology that came out a year or two later :-) Ken Brown
