May 2nd, 2010, 8 Comments »
I spotted this ad on a shopping cart at our local Save-on-Foods, and it struck me as rather baffling.
If we’re talking about ‘feel’, then paying with cash ‘feels’ more right to me. Maybe I’m just getting old, but the exchange of currency for goods and services seems far more natural than using a debit card.
Paying with cash is usually several times faster, less complicated, doesn’t produce any excess receipts or any additional banking fees. As far as I can figure, the only advantages of a debit card are the convenience and possible safety of not having to carry cash. The ad ought to emphasize those benefits, instead of a vague promise and a yellow armored car (short bus, anyone?).
You can almost hear the ad agency throwing up their hands and saying “frack it, I’m out of ideas, let’s just go with ‘it feels right’.”
Out of curiousity, do Save-on-Foods and other retailers prefer that I pay with cash or debit card? I assume the latter, because of the overhead around managing hard currency, but I don’t really know. Are any readers retail-enabled enough to know?
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October 16th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Yesterday, Amber Case tweeted about this awesome ethnography video that shows the shocking diversity in (and apparent consistency with) how people count money:
3 Comments »
May 4th, 2009, No Comments »
Last year we did a bunch of work with DreamBank, a collaborative giving platform aimed at reducing waste and giving people gifts that they really want. Last week I wrote about Kickstarter, a way for creators to collecting funding for projects–a kind of collaborative investment in future art.
Today’s collaborative funding project (courtesy of Springwise) is GradeFund. From the article:
GradeFund lets students recruit sponsorsâ€â€usually friends and familyâ€â€who donate money for each good grade. Participating students upload their transcripts at the end of each term and GradeFund verifies them and then collects funds from the sponsors, who can set their own criteria such as sponsoring students from their alma mater or choosing specific grade levels to sponsor. They can determine donation amounts for each grade, from as low as USD 5.
It’s a nifty, if slightly warped, idea. Though I believe I benefited from such a scheme when I was in high school, I’m not a big fan of incentivizing childrens’ scholastic performance with cash.
The other factor that’s interesting in GradeFund’s case is that surely 100% of ‘sponsors’ will be personally known to the student. That is, there’s no ‘fans’ or benevolent strangers funding the kid’s education. In this sense, the site is less essential than other collaborative funding projects I’ve seen. Surely the child’s family could just put a gradated score card up on the fridge and some money in a jar?
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