In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concerns about trust, privacy
Yeah and it&#x27;s obnoxious as hell. When I moved to Munich from the bay area, suddenly having to actively manage cash and coins on a daily basis felt like I&#x27;d stepped through a portal to a few decades ago. So many places being cash-only is very much &quot;WHAT YEAR IS IT??&quot;<p>Some Germans defend it as &quot;well Germans just prefer their privacy&quot; but they still sign up for loyalty card programs and they <i>are</i> adopting cards for payment, just very slowly for how otherwise-developed they are. This isn&#x27;t really a stance borne out of principled concerns, it comes from a general skepticism&#x2F;paranoia of consumer technology&#x2F;innovations.<p>I see the same thing with how many German institutions still rely on mailing physical letters whereas the equivalent American ones switched to emails a decade+ ago. For example, the Grundschule my son will start at next year needed to tell us about an appointment. Did they use an email, perhaps one they gathered from an earlier appointment we&#x27;d had there? Of course not, they mailed a letter, a letter that <i>didn&#x27;t come until the day of the appointment</i>, which they then berated my wife on the phone for missing.<p>Other examples: to create an online account for my health insurance provider, they sent me a code to confirm the account...using an actual letter for the code. Same deal for recharging an Aldi-Talk SIM, you need to have them mail a letter to your address, and then and only then may you pay (via bank transfer). And the websites I&#x27;ve looked at for the Grundschulen (elementary schools) look like they were made by a high schooler in 2006, whereas when I look at ones for school districts for my nephews and nieces in the states, they actually appear reasonably modern. Or when I got photos from people in my son&#x27;s kindergarten, only one person did sending them over a photo&#x2F;file-sharing service, the others were a flash drive, a CD, many emails with one or more photos attached, and also someone just handing me their whole camera.<p>tl;dr Germany is surprisingly backwards when it comes to consumer technology