Wait, they still use cheques in America?!
They do! It’s like they never heard of EFTs. They also pay many of their bills manually, or even worse, some still mail a cheque in response to a bill they receive via snail mail.
As a CSR at a fuel company who regularly deals with many types of people:
It’s not “Americans haven’t heard of ach/eft”, it’s old Americans who refuse to use it.
I have multiple overly paranoid nutters who insist they must hand their check to my driver or some evil spirit will take their money from them in the night (these are not pleasant people in general, either, so I think it’s that they like forcing an interaction with their nasty asses on my driver’s)
My quick search tells me this is basically the payment processors like Paypal, right? If I understand right, each of them takes a percent of each transaction. It’s often a very American sentiment to prefer a processor that has no middle man taking cuts.
For large sums of money, it’s pretty common to use cashier’s checks, which is probably the kind of check that they’re talking about here.
Aren’t especially for large sums these very risky? I mean you could lose it or they won’t believe it’s real.
Cashiers checks aren’t risky. If the bank they deposit the check at doesn’t think it’s real, they could still deposit it with a check hold.
After that you wait until either the check clears or it gets rejected, and that usually comes with a fee. So banks probably don’t mind the extra fee income
I know right? This would have been an electronic bank transfer here int he UK and I’m sure across Europe.
I can’t remember the last time I used a cheque. Maybe 10 or even 15 years ago? Even that was a random one off. I don’t even have a cheque book and would have to ask the bank especially if I wanted one.
When I was last in California they still had the machine to take an imprint of your card’s numbers in restaurants. Had to check my phone to see what century I was in!
That said, there’s an eccentric car hire guy near here who still uses the machine. But then he has Elvis memorabilia all over his office.
I was at a Walgreens in California a few years ago and handed my card to the cashier. She stuck it in the machine, looked at it funny, the swiped it. Said she had to swipe it because it asked for a pin. She didn’t know that chip & pin is a thing.
I also had to sign a reciept when I used tap at a gas station in North Dakota. Stange place, the USA.
While people don’t use them much, companies do. Both for payroll and bills etc. I work for a a MSP (managed service provider, basically a company that sells scalable IT to other companies) and the amount of check printer tickets we get isn’t small. Also for more shock, faxing is still often used as well.
Holy hell is faxing used by doctors/insurance companies. Luckily efax a lot of times now which is itself hilariously stupid, but plently of paper gets sent over the wire on a technology that is, no shit, from 1850.
We’ve never used your weird ass check-ways
For inventing English you guys are horrible at it
I’m not in America and as recently as a few years ago, I was aware of several companies who had cheque printer sheets from their bank which had something like 3-5 cheques per sheet. You’d load up a template and fill it out, run it through the printer and then just sign them and it’s all good.
I don’t see anyone using personal cheques anymore, but they’re still in use in business.
I had to get a tow from a shop in town I’d not heard of before. Strong chance its just the one dude who works there. He was really surprised I didn’t have a checkbook on me. I was surprised that he was surprised since I’m consistently told I look about 20. I have a checkbook for the rare occasion that I need it, but haven’t written a check since my final rent check before I got my house
I rarely see anyone under 40 using checks anymore. It’s really an older generation thing and they’re stuck in their ways.
They still get stressed out about manually balancing their checkbooks too. Even though it’s an obsolete skill now and the banks keep track of all of the transactions automatically for them
