Credit cards and wallets to become obsolete with Square technology? No!!!
(CBS) - Say it isn't so! We love our wallets. What would we carry in our purses if we didn't have our Kate Spade Harrison Street Lacey or Prada Nylon Bi-Fold? I guess we'd be a couple of hundred dollars richer and five credit cards lighter, but still!
Square, the mobile payments start-up, could be the demise of our cash carriers. On Monday the New York Times reported, Square's co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey announced a new way for shoppers to pay for their purchases. All they have to do is give their name to the merchant... (Identity theft, anyone?)
With Square, customers simply pay using an app called Card
Case on their iPhones or Android phones. (And yes, personal identification
numbers are required for purchases over $50 for the buyer's protection.) Merchants,
in turn, would use an app called Register to ring up and track purchases. Perhaps
this will make lines at stores go faster? (That's a plus!)
Even still, we're not huge fans of the idea (yet) because for one, we love our stylish clutches. Plus, we're afraid this will only derail our progress to save more money. For some shoppers who are bad at math (I'm guilty), if you don't physically see the bills coming out of your wallet, it's hard to guesstimate when you've spent too much. It just becomes funny money at that point.
But then again, Dorsey did bring us Twitter, and we resisted
that at first, too. Now, we can't live without it. Maybe he's onto something here?
At the moment, Square's new payment services are only available at 50 merchants in New York, San Francisco, Washington, St. Louis and Los Angeles. Let us know if you decide to use it and how it goes.
