But people would if outages with cash backups were frequent enough. On a side note, I am baffled by the number of otherwise activist people to whom I expound about the big problems of a cashless society who just shrug to say "hey, what can you do?"

That's why I purposefully try to pay most things with cash.

Yes, I get it, paying with card is easy and kinda nice, but if cash goes away entirely, we have an even bigger problem. So I will be the one who uses it in the hopes to have a miniscule impact on it not going away as fast.

Same thing goes with firefox and not letting the webkit mafia take over.

There aren't that all that many US store clerks I'd trust to do calculations on paper, either. I'm guessing things are different in Japan.

In my (thankfully) long-ago days as a young person working retail, I had a coworker who could not figure out 10% of a given quantity even with a calculator.

Cash is still pretty common in Japan and Germany, so some markets wouldn't even notice a difference.