I've never witnessed this. I still do not own a smartphone. I am actually about to activate one for the first time but I have never needed a phone for anything other than calling or texting someone. I admit that texting on my T9 keypad is a PITA but I rarely text. I had a couple throw-away phones with keypads that were nice but they are hard to find sidekick, etc...
What specific services do you depend on that require a smart phone?
For me its two factor authentication at work. The building was constructed in such a way that there is somehow no cell service at all in the building. I had a smartphone all this time but not the actual two factor app, I would have it call my phone and do a keypress but that only worked when I was working from home. When I go into the office, those calls don't go through, neither does texting a list of codes.
There are other things in life that are certainly a lot more convenient with a smart phone. I rely on public transit, bussing and trains, and if I didn't have a smartphone that would make it a lot more difficult to navigate. Sure I could pull up a paper map of the bus routes and estimate what routing might be the most optimal to get to my destination by hand, and call up the transit agency operator line with my buss stop ID to ask when the next bus is slated to appear, but its infinitely easier to just use google maps and be done with it. When I am on the first bus and anticipating transferring to another bus, unless I knew that bus stop ID for the transfer point ahead of time I cannot call ahead and know when my transfer bus is arriving, for example.
Well, not something I use a lot but Uber/Lyft. I don't need to use my banking app but otherwise I'd have to drive to an ATM to deposit a check. Again, not essential, but there would be a lot more friction when traveling than otherwise.
(And certainly there are a lot of things on the web that are hard to go without and I assume the typical case where someone doesn't have a smartphone doesn't have easy access to a computer either.)
If you think of it like that, then it's awfully inconvenient. But what you do, what I think most of us used to do, is pair that errand with another, like grocery shopping. Chances are fairly good there is an in-network ATM in route to the grocery store, if not at the grocery store. It only adds a minute, maybe a few minutes, to a trip you were going to make anyway.
> but otherwise I'd have to drive to an ATM to deposit a check
Are cheques really that common in the US still? In Ireland, and as far as I'm aware, the rest of the EU, it's rare to see a cheque at all these days. Almost everything is paid either on cards or some other form of electronic transfer.
Not really. Happens enough that you can't call it a surprise to see one, but they're only used in certain niches at this point. I write a check about once a year, for some edge case like I'm paying a contractor who refuses to just get Venmo or equivalent.
Even where they are used (as someone mentioned, you do occasionally see elderly folks write them at the grocery store) they tend to be just a slightly different version of a debit card w/o PIN -- the stores now can instantly run them, there's no way to float one.
I've written about 25 checks for "one-off stuff" in the last year or so, -not including- the checks that pay my electric utility, Internet, trash, water/sewer, auto insurance, and so on. Property taxes are check-only in my area. A lot of kid stuff at school like PTA, reading activities, sports and such are cash or check only. Home maintenance things like painters, gardeners, pool service, trash hauling take checks only. I can't see a way to get along without physical checks, at least in the USA, unless you take a big sweaty wad of cash everywhere you go.
Where in the heck do you live?
Even my kids school had a portal for payments. My yard guy does get paid by check. But I do that via bill pay and the bank sends a check. Even independent painters take Venmo cash app or PayPal
> they tend to be just a slightly different version of a debit card w/o PIN -- the stores now can instantly run them, there's no way to float one.
That's actually the most surprising thing I've heard in this thread. Having that ability would probably go some way toward explaining their longevity. Like I said in another comment, I don't even know if a grocery store / supermarket would accept a cheque here, mostly because they wouldn't have the ability to run them.
Yeah. I don't know the details and I very rarely see them in stores. But there's some sort of system that, as parent says, basically immediately locks the funds so (as I understand it), there's no risk to the store.
I assume things like car dealerships use the system as well. When I bought a car recently I just gave them a personal check which they were fine with. In the past I had to go to my bank and get a cashier's check.
You don't even generally see signs about returned check fees these days.
They're not super-common in general for most use cases but they're still the most straightforward way to make personal payments (other than in-person cash payments) without going through some process that's more involved than giving someone a piece of paper.
Common enough. Ignoring the ones that I never see because my bank writes and delivers them for me, I still periodically get payments for things like FSA as a check. I also write maybe a couple dozen a year for various home service stuff.
(That said, I probably only deposit 5 or 6 checks a year. So putting them in an ATM at the bank wouldn't be a horrible inconvenience. And they are getting less and less common.)
Yes, sadly they're pretty common. My wife's side business is almost always paid with a check. I regularly, but not frequently, receive doctors bills or similar without online payment options, so I have to write ~12 checks/year. My housekeeper doesn't accept Paypal/Venmo, so she's paid with a check as well. Sane for some random laborers (lawn, paint) who are working by word of mouth (and not employed by a larger firm). And it's pretty common for elderly people to use them to pay for groceries.
I guess my counter-question is what does the rest of the world do for doctors bills or paying laborers who don't accept payment via Paypal/Venmo?
Here in Ecuador it's mainly cash, but it's becoming more common to just do a normal bank transfer from a mobile phone. The banking app of my bank here (Pichincha) has a built-in option to share the payment as a .jpg via Whatsapp (or any messaging app) as a sort of confirmation to the recipient.
In the Netherlands banking apps let you create "Payment Requests", which is basically a URL you can share with someone to have them pay you (you can pre-fill the amount they need to pay). Typically, if you open such an URL on your phone, it will let you jump into your banking app of _your_ bank to make the actual payment (even if the payment request is from a different bank than the on you're using).
> And it's pretty common for elderly people to use them to pay for groceries.
Interesting. I'm not even sure a grocery store / supermarket would accept a cheque here.
> My housekeeper doesn't accept Paypal/Venmo, so she's paid with a check as well
Here it'd be either cash in hand, or a bank transfer (same as rent, really). All you need is their IBAN (International Bank Account Number) and BIC (Bank Identifier Code), and most mobile banking apps will let you set up a monthly direct debit. You can sometimes run into issues if their bank account is in a different country to the bank you're transferring from—it's unlawful to discriminate between IBANs in different countries, although it tends to goes unpunished—but there's usually workarounds to that.
All you need is their IBAN (International Bank Account Number) and BIC (Bank Identifier Code), and most mobile banking apps will let you set up a monthly direct debit.
What is this dark magic?!?! lol. The US is comically awful at consumer banking.
And actually just to add to the last question of your comment. We'd also pay for doctors bills by either cash, card, or direct debit. Healthcare in Ireland isn't perfect (long waiting times—but you can go private for quicker care), but it's relatively cheap (free under a certain income, in the cases of certain long-term medical conditions, and above a certain age), and heavily subsidized.
My sister recently had a stay in hospital, and then later an emergency room visit. As far as I'm aware, it all totaled less than €200 (half of which will be refunded by insurance, and another 20% of the remainder as a tax credit), which was all paid for partially by card (to the GP who referred us to the hospital), and partially by bank transfer (to the hospital).
You still get printed bills with the bank account number to send the money to in Germany; only big change in the past decade is that that bank account number is a long IBAN number with the bank’s ID and a checksum rolled in.
I mean, they still exist here in Ireland, my biological grandmother sent me one last christmas; it's still sitting on my desk and I haven't gotten around to cashing it.
If your grandmother balances her checking account every month, it's extra work for her to have outstanding checks.
Also, people at the poverty level often don't know how much money they have to spend for the month until their rent and utility payments are deducted from their account. (they don't do math)
> Also, people at the poverty level [..] (they don't do math)
I'm sorry, but what the fuck sort of paternalistic and defeatist attitude toward education is that?
EDIT: I would like to apologize, I swore in my previous edit of this comment. I did not swear enough. Seriously what the absolute fuck sort of attitude is that toward people and swearing?
'I like to use' is not the same as 'mandatory.' You can call a taxi, you can beg a lift, you can hitchhike, you can walk, you can drive.
The Netherlands has a supermarket (Marqt) which does not accept cash. Thankfully, there are alternatives. Marqt is also so expensive that you're either a yuppie with a debit card or can afford to pay a shopper if you're getting your food there.
That seems rather circular. By definition Uber is a (supposedly) improved taxi service built on mobile computing/data service. If you were transported back in time before smartphones were common/socially essential, Uber wouldn't exist at all.
That would be like an older person complaining they "have to have a smartphone" to see pictures of their grandkids, when it's actually the other around. Because smartphones exist, they can see pictures they otherwise would not have seen at all because no one would have driven to the store, printed them out, and mailed them (or had a camera to take them with) without that technology.
Contrast that to something like parking, where using a phone app provides convenience and decreased operating costs, but the service itself is in no way dependent on people having phones.
>Contrast that to something like parking, where using a phone app provides convenience and decreased operating costs, but the service itself is in no way dependent on people having phones.
Well, if you can no longer pay for something that you used to be able to pay for with coins, you've lost something with a smartphone requirement.
Otherwise I get your argument but, if instead of smartphone, you say computer--now say that you don't really need a computer. You can phone people on your landline but many people won't pick up. OK, you can't use Amazon but there are local stores you can get to. And so forth. At some point, it's probably not like you'll starve but you're cut off from a lot of modern interaction.
Uber/Lyft are so much more reliable than a standard taxi. Before the ridesharing apps, I'd had several experiences of trying to call a taxi company to come pick me up (this is in San Francisco). It never arrived after repeated calls to the dispatcher, saying "it's on the way." If they're overbooked, they simply ignore the requests and you have no remedy other than to call another taxi company, which is likely similarly impacted.
Some restaurants link to their non-optimized printing quality PDF. A few restaurants have made me download a 20 MB PDF, sometimes, while consuming my small and expensive roaming package.
> while consuming my small and expensive roaming package.
I'm curious. Do you get roaming charges having cross state-lines in the US, or do you have a nation-wide data package? Here in the EU, I'm on a plan that gives me unlimited data anywhere in europe, for around 30€ a month.
Roaming isn't really correlated with political boundaries like state lines here in the US. It tends to be when you're in a rural area that only a competing service has bothered to put up towers in.
I go to rural areas all the time. I have yet to see roaming charges and I have T-mobile. I don’t have data roaming charges anywhere in the world - just slower data outside of North America.
> Here in the EU, I'm on a plan that gives me unlimited data anywhere
Interesting. But those plans are not everywhere. I believe that the EU law is having a cap of (currently) 2€/GB for data consumption beyond the amount allowed outside home borders, which is computed by some providers as a proportion of the monthly fee.
I've also seen where you have make your order on the website and then they deliver it to your table. I'm not sure if there was even any other way to order and pay.
I succumbed to the smartphone in 2019 because my university expected it, both formally (2 factor authentication for student email/canvas/registration account) and informally (professor deciding to use an online quiz game as a fun way to review material and give extra points).
Additionally every bank has an app and some of them don't have branches in every city so they say "just deposit checks via mobile"
We went to an amusement park this summer and they no longer give out paper maps of the park. We had to squint at the online map on the tiny screens of our phones.
It was a shame because I would have liked to give out maps to the kids so they could navigate/orient themselves.
A few days afterward, I actually went to the trouble of printing nice legal-sized color versions of the map at Staples to give to the kids as mementos. Sure enough, they loved looking at and discussing those maps just like I did as a kid.
Next time we go I'm printing maps ahead of time so we can have them while we're there.
US sports are already headed there. Proprietary apps help them control (eliminate) the secondary market in two ways: they broker transactions between people (app-to-app) and prevent scalpers from transacting paper tickets.
MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL all do this with league-branded apps and/or partnerships with Ticketmaster, etc
With my current MLB tickets I can take a screen shot of the ticket and text it to somebody else. Much easier than a ticketmaster transfer. The world cup is using a time base code to prevent any transfer of tickets.
Being able to call an Uber or Lyft when I need it has made it much easier to live without a vehicle. I have tried to call a cab company using the phone before, but even they have transitioned to using apps for dispatch now.
Would add airports. If I’m not checking a bag, I can walk straight to security, do an iris scan at CLEAR and show my digital boarding pass to security and at the gate.
That said, there are manual workarounds to almost everything requiring a smartphone. They’re simply less efficient.
OTOH it only takes you thirty seconds to transmute your confirmation number into a paper boarding pass at the check in stations, which are empty now that everyone uses apple/android wallet. Maybe that would actually be better even if you have a smartphone, if you are concerned about battery life or roaming charges.
In the US--I can't speak to CLEAR--but even with TSA Pre you have to show your ID. (I'm not sure they've even looked at my boarding pass when I've flown recently. I assume the computers are correlating my ID with the flight reservation in the system.)
If I can conveniently print out a boarding pass either at home or at the airport I tend to do so. That way I'm not fiddling with my phone when I don't need to.
(I think I've seen it the other way around in London at least.)
> I can walk straight to security, do an iris scan at CLEAR
I'm sorry, what? Outside the US I just show my boarding card prior to going through security. I'm pretty sure my ID doesn't get checked until I board the plane, so hearing that you show biometrics is a bit jarring.
I was in the US a few weeks ago, but I can't remember if I had to show ID when going through security on leaving. I tend to work on autopilot when navigating airports.
It's been a while since I have flown anywhere, but I don't think we check ID at the gate here? So it's not really any better or worse, it's just at a different point in the process.
You might be right. I'll be honest, my approach to airports and flying is to have a few drinks once I get past security and then sleep my way as best I can through the flight. I can't remember if my passport was checked when I boarded on leaving Seattle.
What specific services do you depend on that require a smart phone?