In this electronic age, I am one of those persons who seldom carries cash on me. I have a debit card & a credit card (because I needed to build up credit, especially once I had to take out student loans). At school, much of what I pay for is either on my debit card or my student account, which is essentially a meal plan that we put so much money into at the beginning of the semester. My substitute teaching checks go straight to the bank, as do any checks I get from family around the holidays, so I seldom have actual, physical dollar bills in my hands. Quite honestly, the only thing that I typically find myself needing cash for is garage sales & even they’ll take checks depending on the seller & what it is that I’m purchasing.
Cash is king, in some places, however. Casinos, flea markets, & pawn shops are a few places which come to mind who prefer to deal in cold, hard cash. Oddly enough, though, cash is not really worth much if you think about it. It costs more to mint or print some physical money than the monetary value we place upon the currency (I’m looking at you, worthless penny!). Money has value because we treat it as though it has value. If I pick up a leaf & someone says, “Hey, I’ll give you a candy bar for that leaf,” then my leaf suddenly has value when it otherwise had none, apart from perhaps being colorful. It always surprises me how we determine the worth of some items & that we ascribe certain things of being “of more worth” than others. Like a flat screen TV can be worth more than a car, depending on a number of variables. Worth, money, value, & the buying and selling of goods are all created things, but things to which we have gone to war over.
- To what do you ascribe worth?
- Do you find yourself dealing in cash or electronic money, like debit or credit?
- What do you buy on a regular basis?
- What determines the value of an item in your mind?
Kimberly Woods 