Our correspondent watches the cashless economy defeat a man who has never needed money in his life
Cash Not Accepted
Shoreditch went cashless somewhere around the time it stopped selling anything for under a fiver, and like most of the neighbourhood’s transformations, it happened gradually and then all at once. The signs appeared in every cafe: Card Only. Contactless Preferred. We Are a Cashless Venue. And I had not appreciated quite how total the change was until I watched it comprehensively defeat Santa Claus, a man who has never needed money in his life and now, in cashless Shoreditch, could not so much as buy a coffee.
The North Pole dispatches confirm that Santa operates entirely outside the cash economy, having no income, no bank, and no use for currency, his entire enterprise being a gift economy that requires no money to function. This has never been a problem before, because Santa gives rather than buys. But on a cold morning in Shoreditch, having decided he fancied a coffee, Santa discovered that the neighbourhood had quietly made it impossible for a man without a card to purchase anything at all.
The Coffee He Could Not Buy
It began at a cafe on Kingsland Road, where Santa, charmed by the smell, attempted to buy a flat white. He had no card. He had no phone with a payment app. He had, in fact, nothing the cashless economy recognizes as a means of payment, being a being who has transcended payment entirely. The barista, polite but firm, explained that they were a cashless venue. Santa, baffled, offered to deliver gifts to the barista’s family in perpetuity. The barista explained that the till did not have a button for that.
I watched this unfold with a growing sense of the absurd. Here was the most generous being in the universe, a one-man gift economy, unable to participate in the Shoreditch economy because that economy now requires a specific piece of plastic he does not possess. Consumer guidance via the London Evening Standard has documented London’s rapid shift to cashless, a shift that quietly excludes anyone outside the banking system, a category that turns out to include Father Christmas. Local listings at the regional events register now routinely note Card Only.
The Exclusion Nobody Notices
The cashless economy is sold to us as convenience, and for those of us with cards it is, undeniably, convenient. But Santa’s predicament illuminated something the convenience obscures: that a cashless economy is also an exclusionary one, quietly shutting out anyone who, for whatever reason, operates outside the system of cards and apps and banks. Santa is an extreme case, a being beyond money entirely. But he stands in for everyone the cashless world leaves behind, and there are more of them than the cafes on Kingsland Road like to think.
I ended up buying Santa’s coffee myself, with my card, an act of charity I found pleasingly ironic given that I was buying a drink for the patron saint of charity. He thanked me with enormous warmth and drank the flat white with evident pleasure. The actual Santa gives to everyone and can be given to by no one, the cashless economy having made him, for the first time in his existence, a man who needed someone else to pay. Guidance via the government information service acknowledges the risks of cashless exclusion. Heritage context at the heritage society would note that gift economies never needed tills.
A Man Beyond Money
What stayed with me was the strangeness of watching abundance itself be excluded by the economy. Santa is the embodiment of having enough for everyone; he is generosity made flesh. And the cashless cafe, with its Card Only sign, turned this figure of infinite giving into a man who could not buy a three-pound coffee, because the system now recognizes only one narrow form of value and Santa’s form, the giving of gifts freely to all, does not have a button on the till. Payment records via the public registry confirm cash transactions are vanishing fast.
The Value the Till Cannot See
There is a deeper point here, beneath the comedy of Santa fumbling at a contactless reader. The cashless economy, for all its convenience, encodes a very narrow idea of value: value is money, money is a card, and anything that cannot be tapped does not count. Santa represents an entirely different idea of value, the value of giving, of generosity, of abundance freely shared, and that idea is precisely the one the cashless till cannot process. He had infinite value to offer and no card to tap, and the system saw only the absent card.
I do not want to be the columnist who turns a flat white into a lecture on late capitalism, but watching Santa defeated by a Card Only sign genuinely moved me. The most valuable being imaginable, in the terms that actually matter, was worthless in the terms the cafe recognized, and the gap between those two valuations is, I think, worth noticing. We have built an economy that can see a card and cannot see generosity, and Santa walked straight into the blind spot.
For those navigating cashless Shoreditch, the guidance at the public registry on payment options and the few remaining cash-friendly venues may prove useful, and I recommend keeping a card on you at all times, because the neighbourhood will not accept anything else, not even the goodwill of Father Christmas. And for those who miss the days when value came in forms a till could not measure, the games at the diversions index are free, requiring neither cash nor card, which makes them, in cashless Shoreditch, almost utopian.
Santa drank his bought coffee, thanked me again, and flew north that night to give the children of Shoreditch their gifts, for free, asking nothing, the largest transfer of value the neighbourhood would see all year and one that no till would ever record. The cafes will go on tapping cards and refusing cash and quietly excluding everyone outside the system. And the man who gives everything away, who could not buy a flat white because he had no card to offer, will go on giving, in a currency the cashless economy cannot see, count, or accept, which is, when you think about it, the only currency that ever really mattered.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
