The wallet is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. The kind of shopping, where you hand over notes and count out change in return, now happens only in the most minor of our retailers  , like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk from a corner shop. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge   retail stores, Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, for instance, you don't go and stand at any kind of cash register when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa. Across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But earning money isn't quick or easy for most of us. Isn't it a bit weird  that spending it should happen in half a blink   of an eye? Doesn't a wallet, that time-honored Friday-night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness, represent something that matters? But I'll leave the economics to the experts. What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment. Everything about the look and feel of a wallet, the way the materials wear and tear and loosen with age, the plastic and paper and gold and silver, and handwritten phone numbers and printed cinema tickets, is the very opposite of what our world is becoming. The opposite of a wallet is a smart phone or an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as a pebble  . Instead of digging through pieces of paper, we move our fingers left and right. No more counting out coins. Show your wallet, if you still have one. It may not be here much longer. How are businesses done in big modern stores?
Electronically. In the abstract. Individually. Via a cash register.