Yves here. Having never used a check for payment at a retail store, I cannot confess to nostalgic attachment to this practice. In fact, even in the stone ages of my youth, I wondered why stores accepted them, since unless the customer was known and trusted, there was no fast and simple way to verify the check would not bounce.
However, this piece serves as an excuse to mention another facet of the war on cash, which could be reframed as the war on non-electronic payments (however, in fairness, the author below does urge retailers to use cash as the fallback for checks, and does not push electronic or card payments).
Your humble blogger does like to use a check to pay certain business expenses, since it makes it easy for my accountant to determine which vendor or contractor got the money. There are far too many mystery/poorly described entries on both bank and credit card statements, and it’s a time sink to sort them out.
However, banks of late have been pressuring customer hard to give up on checks. One friend had an experience that does make it make sense. Someone apparently got a check image, and then created a raft of fake checks and ran them through Chase successfully, getting roughly $20,000 from the account. What is astonishing is how poor the bank’s security was (and that the perp was clearly an insider and knew how to avoid triggers). The check were all just below $200, most in exactly the same amount, with check numbers outside the range of any checks printed on that account. Oh, and many checks were cleared each day on many successive days before anyone woke up to what was happening.
Chase did eventually restore most of the money, but (understandably) shut the consumers’ account, depriving them of access of the rest of the funds in the account for what I inferred was an unpleasantly long time (the customer was well heeled but the compromised account was the primary transaction account and working around the loss of that was not easy). The customer also had to go to a branch in person (I don’t recall how many times) to get a new account opened and the sequestered funds moved over.
I recently opened a small business account at Citi and was given a huge lecture about not using checks due to account compromise risk and was urged to use their ACH. But the amount of set-up when I only have 10-12 parties I pay this way was grotesquely disproportionate. Apparently their “small business” customers are much bigger than me and have accounts payable staffers who would use a system like this often and so would become conversant in this bloatware and not forget how it operated between uses. I don’t write checks often enough to justify the time cost of such a cumbersome, feature-larded system.
By Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor of Markets, Public Policy and Law, Boston University. Originally published at The Conversation
Can you still use a check to make purchases? In increasing numbers of stores across the U.S., the answer is “no.” The large retailer Target stopped accepting checks on July 15, 2024. It follows decisions a decade earlier by supermarketchains Whole Foods and Aldi to no longer accept this form of payment.
Target said it was phasing out checks because not many customers use them. It’s a fair point: Check usage has fallen dramatically around the world in recent decades.
However, as a business school professor who studies how people pay for goods and services, I wonder if Target might have another, unspoken motivation. After all, customers started the switch away from checks years ago. What’s new today is a rise in check fraud.
A Brief History of Checking
Checks have been around a long time — centuries, in fact. Paper checks are simply directions telling banks how much money to move from one account to another. Today, these directions take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to be carried out. That’s why stores prefer customers pay with debit cards, which act like checks but remove money from an account immediately.
Checks were a huge part of the U.S. economy only a few decades ago. The Federal Reserve, the U.S.’s central bank, processed 17 billion checks a year back in 2000, compared with 3 billion today.
While the Fed doesn’t process every check — for example, checks written between accounts at the same bank don’t go through the Fed system — the numbers offer a sense of the overall decline. In 2000, the average American wrote roughly 60 checks cleared by the Fed each year, compared with about nine today.
Until 20 years ago, all checks had to be physically returned to the person writing the check after they were processed so that the writer could make sure the amount they wrote the check for matched what was deducted from their account. Years ago, I paid all my bills by check, and each month, my bank would send a fat envelope — which I never opened — containing my canceled checks.
To physically return all the checks, the government maintained a special fleet of planes that each night flew canceled checks around the country. Then in 2004, a new law allowed banks to send customers pictures of their checks, which eliminated the need to fly them.
Who Still Writes Checks in 2024?
While the Fed may be processing 80% fewer checks than it was in the early 2000s, its data shows the average person is still writing at least nine checks a year. So who is writing all those checks? The answer includes many people who deny ever writing checks.
Let me explain. Many people now use their bank’s online bill payment service. While many of these payments are done electronically, payments to smaller businesses and individuals are done by the bank writing a check on your behalf.
Plus, there are still people who write out checks to landlords, contractors, charities and government agencies. Many people still give checks at weddings, births and other special occasions. Last, many businesses still write checks to other businesses when paying their bills.
Why Stores Don’t Want Checks
Given that checks are still being used — albeit less often than before — why are businesses like Target, Whole Foods and Aldi refusing them? I think an important part of the story is that check fraud is becoming rampant in the U.S.
The U.S. Treasury has a dedicated department that fights monetary crimes, called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCen for short. FinCen gets “Suspicious Activity Reports” from banks about activities from money laundering to loan fraud. FinCen reports that the number of check fraud cases has exploded since 2020, nearly doubling from 2021 to 2022.
One of the biggest places where this fraud occurs are checks written at the cash register. As the Atlanta Fed points out, “Anyone with graphics software and a high-quality printer can readily turn out counterfeit checks.”
Merchants are hit with a double whammy when check fraud occurs. First, they lose the merchandise, which cannot be sold to a legitimate customer. Then, unlike shoplifting, the store is faced with more financial pain because most banks charge both the merchant and the check writer when a counterfeit check is presented. Both sides are charged because the Federal Reserve charges high fees for returning uncollectable checks.
Target’s most recent annual report mentioned a problem with theft, saying, “We continue to experience higher inventory shrink, as a percentage of sales, relative to historical levels.” Translated into plain language, this means people are stealing more from Target than they have in the past.
The increase in check fraud means Target’s recent announcement will likely be repeated soon by other chains. I expect in the future only stores like Costco, which photograph every member and has every customer’s address on file, will allow checks.
Since retailers often raise prices when check fraud happens to cover the losses, curbing check fraud lowers prices and is in the interest of every honest consumer.
And for those stores worried about increasing check, debit and credit card fraud, there is a simple answer: Encourage your customers to use cash. Paper money is safe and secure, and once handed over, any retailer knows the transaction is paid. Going old-school with paper money has real benefits.
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In continental Europe they use the “giro” system. It does not help with paying at the store, but it is good for bills. The payee, say the power company, will send a slip of paper with its bankgiro number on it and you then tell your own bank to ship money to that bank number. It works very much like the electronic payment once you set it up at the bank except it is easier since you get a solid “send to” address for the payment.
A nice thing is that everyone has a giro number and can receive payment through it. So it useful for transaction between ordinary people and does not need the electronic to check work around for smaller payees.
This system pushes money to the recipient rather than allowing someone else to pull money from your account and reduces the fraud of duplicating/altering checks. You would need to verify that the money is going to the right place. But sending a limited amount of money one to the wrong place is better than infinite drafts against your account.
As for using cash, I believe the penny is still around in order to discourage the use of cash. They take up a lot of space and are tedious to use.
PSA: In the UK, “Giro” was used for paying unemployment and other Social Security benefits, and became a synonym for such payments. This, when you hear something like “When am I gonna get me Giro?” in, e.g., a UK TV show, the speakers is asking when they will get their SS payment. It largely replaced “dole” around the late ’70s-early ’80s, I would guess, starting in the north.
I wonder about that. In the Euro zone, the one and two cent coins are still around due to vociferous resistance from consumers to them being removed (mainly from Germans). It’s the central banks which – perhaps with good reason since they represent extremely small values – have wanted them removed for a long time, not ordinary people. Same situation in many countries. I don’t know if the US is very different, but a lot of people just want to be able to get change back in full.
I should say that this highlights the importance of having coin deposit machines at bank branches, without fees of course, so you can just save up coins you don’t want to use for payments and then cash them in, with the value being credited to your checking account. Then you can just put small coins in a container at home and pass by the local bank branch every month or so. Once those machines are gone, or suddenly become burdened with heavy fees, which I suspect is the case not just where I live but in many places, cash becomes much more of a hassle to use.
In Australia, they got rid of pennies before I lived there, in 2002-2004. All transactions were rounded to the nearest 5 cents.
I see. In Sweden where I am from, smaller denomination coins have been removed in stages quite aggressively, and prices rounded up or down to the nearest coin (or, for card/digital transactions, not rounded). I’m old enough to remember only the 50 öre (½ SEK) coin, but those are gone now. The smallest coin is now the 1 krona coin, equivalent to about 10 US or Euro cents.
Though I am very German (and non-Swedish) myself in my attachment to cash, there’s something annoyingly irrational about the German insistence to get exact change down to the nearest cent, forever. If 1 cent precision is all-important no matter how much inflation reduces the value of that, then why have they never demanded for example 0.5 cent or 0.1 cent coins?
There’s a similar thing with how Americans insist that the sum of 1 US dollar should be represented by a bill no matter how small that amount becomes in real terms, and consequently no matter how fast these bills are worn out in circulation. As if time was frozen around the time they were children or inflation did not exist.
Cheques have been consigned to history here in Oz for years now. Last week I actually had to deposit one into my bank account and I seriously could not remember when I handled a cheque last. I hadn’t heard about it but it looks like the cheque system in Oz will wind down no later than 2030. They reckon that in the past 10 years alone, cheque usage has declined by 90%. So I guess that this too will happen in the US-
https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/jim-chalmers-2022/media-releases/modernising-payments-infrastructure-phasing-out-cheques
I can recall even having seen a cheque since the early 80’s. Can’t say I would know anymore what to do with one, if I encountered one in the wild.
I guess I’ve been completely spoiled by the system Yoghurt describes above. When I receive invoices, they always come with all the information I need to tell my bank to transfer the money to the issuer. In this day and age, I can scan the barcode with my banks phone app and pay the bill with a couple of button clicks and a security code.
I had to do this several times last year, for the first time in decades. This was, of course, for my US pension, for deposit in a US bank. As an expat, I had to fill out some forms in order for them to agree to direct deposit, because of some stupid US law.
This is a real problem for old people stuck in their houses paying their bills .Surgeons and superannuation benefits are the last hold-outs as well as council rates but the pressure is on to stop cheques even though electronic security of bank accounts continues to get worse. Only some clearing banks still handle cheques, all the others use specialist contractors now. You definitely need a separate bill paying account going forward you can sacrifice.
I work at a bank holding company and my project team recently met with our senior fraud officer. We were told that the main reason why banks no longer want to accept checks is because there is too much fraud. There are systems in place to try to catch fraudulent checks, but a lot still gets through. The main reason seemed to be the lag between posting and fund availability and when the issuing bank would recognize the fraudulent activity (including when a defrauded customer would become aware of the activity).
But the posting speed is due to the Feds requiring faster clearing. I recall as recently as the early 2000s that my bank would call if they did not recognize my signature (I have a very erratic one) to approve payment. There is not enough time for that now.
Citi to its credit does allow for a service on its small business accounts where they will call you to approve checks when they post. But since I am overseas, the window for that is sleeping hours here.
Got added to moms account a few months months ago. Sent a check to county last month for car tax .Neglected to sign it, yet it cleared.
When I was in private practice (2021 to 2023), I much preferred checks to credit cards given that checks do not incur merchant fees and I could deposit the via ATM. My process server (to whom I wrote many checks per month) also preferred checks.
Everybody wants permission to just draw the money they say you owe directly from your bank account. This has been true of utilities, insurance companies and credit card companies for a long time. But now mom and pop businesses are demanding it as well. I ain’t playin’
I lived through the days of AOL cancellation failure attempts.
Who would ever allow some nobody to make ‘pull payments’ against their accounts. We have a couple, reluctantly, Netflix and NYT, but through PayPal, where we can shut them down at the click of a button.
Until banks allow the payer to shut them down, or better yet approve a single request (again, PayPal figured that out a decade ago), this family ain’t playing either.
I understand the reluctance to use PayPal, but they have features the banks, as far as I can tell, don’t offer.
My husband and I give checks for wedding/birthday gifts. We find it has the least leakage in terms of fees and charges. We are also able to track the receiver cashes the check. With gift cards, who knows if it got used or us gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.
I do pay by cash whenever possible, doing my bit to save the cash economy. Tilting at windmills perhaps.
Gift Cards are so much free money for stores. There is healthy sub economy of trading – which is probably full of fraud. The majority of my wedding presents were gift cards. (Possibly in response to saying no gifts and not having a registry anywhere.)
You know who takes checks? Boarding stables, farriers, trainers, haulers, and even horse shows. Farriers and barns are creeping towards Venmo and such but I’ve been writing horse checks all this time. Not sure if this is because they can make any demands they wish, or because they may be making transactions where phone service is spotty or doesn’t exist.
My credit union’s last merger led to not showing merchants unless I go three clicks into a transaction. Just provides a list of debit and credit amounts with a date and a transaction number, which can be clicked to show the name of the CU with the date and amount, which can be clicked to show the fast food place or whatever. How this is useful or to whom is a baffling mystery.
“Since retailers often raise prices when check fraud happens to cover the losses, curbing check fraud lowers prices and is in the interest of every honest consumer.”
I had to smile at the naivete of this contention. Prices of goods and services are, in the general sense, “sticky.” They go up, but seldom ever come down. An extended period of price drops even has its own name in economics: deflation. Lest we forget, mainstream economics considers most deflation as “a bad thing.” (‘Bad’ for who is the point.)
I’m fully on board with the call for the return to a cash economy at the retail level.
A secondary consideration is the ephemeral nature of all electronics based activities. There is no guarantee that those ‘electronic’ cheques will be maintained for as long as one needs them. Physical cheques are solid, durable, and legal documents. Electronic ones? They might be legal, if you can find them after a major power outage.
This is a case where “old school” is superior, despite the extra “work” involved.
A few thoughts.
Speaking only about doing business with the little Mom and Pop merchants in our little corner of this Earth, all credit card charges now have the 3-4 % credit card fee added on. Cash or a check saves that fee.
Using Debit cards may require a minimum purchase.
And yes, cash for the little guy makes it easier to “manage” gross income on your tax form.
I just stood in line for the umpteenth time waiting for someone to run their card I don’t know how many times to have it not work. Jaysus on a bicycle, hard is it to carry ten bucks on yourself!? Stuff it in your shoe or sock like us losers did in the old days when we were short on pockets.
Never mind the times when the power is out but the store is still open and recording transactions on paper for the moment. Or the ” Network ” is down.
My tin foil hat has me thinking the little things like this are just prepping the cage above, you get used to this little by little and then it’s dropped and you have no options but to submit to living your life in a digital currency world with all the good and bad with it. And my mind just trends to the bad. I guess just buy stock in the big credit card companies as this subject is nothing but positive news for future earnings.
A few years back in my corner of the world the central bank investigated the cost of different payment methods and it turned out debit card was almost four times cheaper than cash. Credit card was three times more expensive (still not talking about 3-4% of the total, but ~90 cents/transfer).
It turns out that handling, sorting, securing and transferring cash comes with it’s own expenses for stores, security companies, banks, central banks and mints.
I have another reason why ‘cash’ is a preferred medium of exchange; it keeps more people working ‘handling’ it.
Lots of merchants use the cost of handling cash as an excuse not to use it. I don’t buy it considering these machines have been in use for decades, are widely available, relatively inexpensive, and in my experience, do not make mistakes.
What merchants really don’t like is employees walking off with money from the till, but there are ways to deal with that too.
I much prefer checks for business payments for precisely the reason you mentioned – no fees deducted.
The other benefit of checks for business payments is the check stub that comes with it and generally describes exactly what invoice is being paid. And quite often there is a phone # listed on the check in case there are any issues.
Contrast that with electronic payments, which very often come in with minimal information. I have spent hours and hours trying to track down electronic payments on a regular basis. It quite often involves calls to multiple banks and then the business in question. That never happens with check payments.
I do understand why small merchants might not want to take checks due to the likelihood of them bouncing. I have recently been patronizing a small used bookstore that is right up my alley. The owner does all business in his store and does not sell anything online, a rarity for used booksellers these days. And he does not accept any electronic payments. He says the ATM across the street was installed basically for him so patrons could get cash. But I was very surprised recently to find that he does accept checks. Fraud must be very low among purchasers of antiquarian books.
…waiting for someone to run their card I don’t know how many times to have it not work
Ever open up a statement and see that it indeed ‘worked’? Several times I’ve had to trudge back, statement in hand, a few weeks later to get a refund for the ‘attempts’
In my neighborhood, we have a lot of car break ins (or more likely, someone left their car unlocked). The police tell me that what the thieves are looking for most is a checkbook or cash. They’ll literally leave everything else is a semi-strewn state, just hoping to find some checks.
Interestingly, I was talking to my 80-year-old parents on the phone this weekend, and they reported that Target was no longer taking checks. So there still are some check fans out there. I always wonder if they notice that I don’t cash most of their checks. They did mention wanting to PayPal recently, though.
My biggest issue with debit and credit cards are the interchange fees, which act like a tax on the entire economy. The US has the highest fees in the world, and it can cost merchants 3-4% on every transaction. That may not sound like much, but if you have low margins already, then the cost is huge. Contrast Europe, where countries regularly cap fees at 1% or less—and in France the cap is .21%. There is simply no justification for the high fees in the US, other than the fact that banks have captured Congress. It does not cost Mastercard or Visa 3% to process your credit or debit card payment.
During the multi-week Irish bank strike of the 1970’s (1960’s? PK, please advise), the Irish economy continued to function thanks to pubs and cheques. Landlords know who is reliable and keep a large float of cash.
People would pay each other by cheque. Cheques are in legal terms “negotiable instruments” and can be endorsed by the receiver as payable to a third party. Cheques became fiat money, in a sense (albeit dependent on the chain of endorsements and ultimately the original payor – I forget the details but I have a feeling that the endorsers may have become guarantors, essentially, of the original amount, depending on the form of endorsement). To the extent than anybody needed cash, the local publican, as the final destination of a lot of disposable income, was in a position to cash a cheque (and assess the creditworthiness of the payor/chain).
Obviously, in a world of digital payments or even central bank money this episode seems quaint but it highlights the real power and property of negotiable instruments / promissory notes (open-access trust and relationships, anybody can issue) versus specie (trust of state) versus bank money and payments (trust of privileged middleman / the Borg).
It was before my time! The Bank Strike of 1970 famously made the pubs the real ‘banks’ of the country.
An uncle owned a pub and I can remember as a child in the 1970’s that he would sometimes give cash in exchange for a cheque to customers – often when they were betting on the horses. It was just a matter of convenience, easier than going to the bank when you needed some, and saved my uncle the security costs of keeping too much cash – the pub was not far from the Northern Ireland border, so armed hold-ups were not uncommon back in the 1970’s. Another pub we frequented back then in Co. Sligo was many miles from any bank and so the cash/cheque thing was very common, just another public service along with helping out elderly bachelors get their dinners and selling sliced pan and baked beans along with the pints.
The dodgy banking habits of many country pubs were revealed by the switch over to the Euro. More than one publican got caught out by the taxman when he arrived at his local bank the week before with several years stack of takings in cash. In one case, the publican allegedly fell off his bike on the way, resulting in a trail of cash several miles long leading to the bank because the bag on the rear of the bike split open.
And on the subject of betting on horses, I can remember when the fine countrymen going to England during the Cheltenham Festival would get a full security search on the way out, to make sure they weren’t bringing bricks of cash out with them. I guess cheques weren’t accepted by English bookies.
I used to use my local Seattle bar for banking purposes quite frequently. They didn’t accept checks from everybody, but they would take them from regulars. If I was short on cash, I would write a check to the bar in the evening and get enough change in cash for a few more drinks and a cab ride home. Then the next day I’d deposit the cash I made waiting tables in the bank to cover the check I wrote the night before. I did that hundreds of times with no problem, and never bounced a one.
Checks can be used fraudulently, but they could also be a boon to the less well heeled as a way to slide by. Not sure if you could still do that today since the time for a check to clear has been drastically reduced.
Before my time too, I hasten to add!
It being 1970 makes me feel better about not being sure which decade it was in. :-)
The idiom for writing a cheque with insufficient funds was the rather beautiful “kiting a cheque”. Obviously related to the figure of speech “flying a kite” for embarking on a fanciful sally / bluff / gambit but the idiom is so visual: you see the little cheque up there, cross-braced and rhomboid at the end of a string with a streamer tail, held aloft by chutzpah as much as by the wind, defying financial gravity….
The clearing cycle for cheques created a societal “float” for payments, that was a function of trust. I think NC has posted articles on payment mechanisms discussing the liquidity issues and lack of buffers in the move to intraday payments like UK Faster Payments, which make the system much more tightly coupled.
PS: I just thought of the Beatles lyric “For the benefit of Mr Kite, there will be a show tonight”. I wonder if this lyric was not just driven by the rhyme but by the notion they were putting on shows to make sure their cheques cleared, given the demands of 102 pence in the pound Supertax ….
I read small business owner discussion groups and they’ve been saying for years not to accept checks. For the people that do it’s recommended to use a service that basically converts the check to a debit and tries to draft it automatically. You do this while the customer is standing there waiting, and then they argue about how they were trying to skate the payment and deposit the money in 1-2 days to cover it. I’m sure the charge for this is as much as any other processing payment.
I bank with capital one 360 which is entirely online. They are not check-friendly. They don’t make it easy to get checks. They also only allow you to use their checks, you can’t order checks from a third party printed with your account info, which I thought was against the rules. Now there is no way to even note the checks you’ve written. So you can’t keep track of them while they’re processing, you just see when they clear. When doing bill pay, they used to offer to mail a check to small vendors that weren’t set up in their system. No longer.
Our credit union doesn’t overtly bad mouth checks; and they even offer free checking with $100 in a savings account. They do not however offer free checks for the account. The last order of 80 checks (ordered the least expensive plain checks available) came to $38 for 80 checks. I have been doing some auto deductions for common monthly bills recently in an effort to lower living costs and save $0.55 on a stamp per mailed check.
Re: check image fraud – this happened to my brother (in Brooklyn) last year. He, too, had an acct. at Chase, who were anything but helpful. My brother wanted to file a police report but Chase refused to provide him w/any documentation about what happened (and yes, he went to multiple branch offices to speak with real live humans). My brother wound up having to go to a notary instead. I’m unsure how much of his missing funds have been returned.
His case involved copies of checks, as well as the retroactive rescinding of (valid!) checks he’d written to vendors, resulting in irate phone calls from those vendors. To be honest, I’m not sure I understand it all myself.
My wife found out the hard way about Target no longer accepting checks yesterday. She went into the local Target to pay the full balance on our Target card & they would not accept a check for payment (this was not a merchandise purchase). They do, however, apparently still take checks mailed mailed in with monthly statement.
Go figure…
So how will the Dude now pay for his cream to make his White Russians!
I was surprised recently to find that chemically washing checks to commit fraud was still a thing.
When I worked at WAMU bank 25 years ago now, I remember news stories about criminals robbing mail boxes on the street, rifling through the mail to find envelopes with checks, and then chemically washing them to change the payee and amount. I did have someone who passed one to me at work and got away with it. The ink on the check did look runny, but this was Seattle where it rained all the time and I chalked it up to the check getting wet due to the weather.
But this is a lot of work! These days you can commit fraud digitally and at scale which seems a lot easier, less risky, and more profitable. But apparently there are still some old school fraudsters out there because we recently had to deal with a chemically washed check at my current employer.
I’ve noted before that banks are mechanically and digitally processing checks and really don’t check the info on them all that closely. I have seen checks go through without any signature on them at all because the machine readers didn’t catch it. That was bad enough, but this newer practice of using cellphone photos of checks rather than the actual document seems incredibly ripe for fraud.
I do not write checks for retail transactions. I use cash or certain credit cards for payments larger than the amount of cash I feel comfortable carrying. I use checks to pay utilities, credit charges and regular bills as much as possible — some like Medicare and my Medicare Supplement insist on sucking money directly from my bank account.
Postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has continued his war against the U.S. Postal Service, raising the postage rate and slowing the delivery of mail, and based on my experiences over the last few years, his efforts have on occasion lead to greater unreliability to the delivery of mail. To complement these ‘improvements’ to the U.S. Postal Service many of the utilities send their bills later and demand their payments sooner. [I thought DeJoy was supposed to be replaced. I suppose Biden’s appointees to the USPS Board of Governors just could not budge DeJoy.]
This push to electronic money is pushing me to get my money out of the banks and into something real, something tangible — sowable, millable, edible, useful, beautiful, tradeable. At the end of the day, even cash is only paper. As the Empire collapses I feel squeezed from every direction.
There was a long line of Old Boomers at the local post office last Saturday buying lifetime supply of Forever stamps before the price increase.
I use my credit card at chain stores for the cash back feature. And use my debit card 12 times a month to get free checking. I never carry a balance on my c/c, I just pay it off in full every month. To me, the c/c is just a payment method.
I do try to use cash at the small independent merchants. But there aren’t many of them around these days.
When I get my credit card bill, I take it to the credit union that issued the card, and have the teller transfer the funds from one of my accounts to pay the c/c bill. The tellers hate doing this, as it is cumbersome and time consuming. But I prefer they deal with the hassle.
I still write checks about 15 times a year.
Do you actually pay off your credit card bill “in full”, or just the statement balance to avoid interest? I pay the statement balance, and my credit reports show an average CC debt of $1,000, but I never pay interest.
The last time I wrote a check (~30€) was as a kind of deposit to assure I would attend a chess tournament till the (for me bitter) end, i.e. I had to pay about 20€ in cash as entry fee, that I wouldn’t see again¹ in any case, and additionally write the check, that was returned to me after completing the last round (instead of disappearing from the ongoing tournament, when hopes of winning at least a consolation prize have vanished or the threshold of narcissistic injury has been exceeded.).
As far as I remember, similar uses of checks, even in the (small) business world, were not uncommon in Germany till they became obsolete.
¹The collected fees were recycled as prize monies
We purposely write monthly Checks to pay for Energy, Auto/Home/Medical Insurance, Utility costs. We contend that slows the Quck Proft-making process with these egregious Costs that have greatly increased over the last two years.
While these huge corporations contend the costs have increase because of higher inflation, we don’t believe a word of that. They have purposely done that…..It’s our way of fighting back against those Monoliths.
Checks work good for political donations. Candidates for local/states can’t process their own CC and I don’t think Venmo works well. There are options like WinRed for Rs but checks have advantage.
Accounting for cash donations is a lot of work.
After the people paying with cash, people paying by check leave less of an electronic footprint to be sold / tracked as compared to credit cards and various e-payment systems.