Today's paperless thought comes from the past employment at a retail
store. There were several different ways to pay for goods at the store,
including cash, check, gift cards and credit cards, as well as paying
online and being able to stop into the store and pick up your purchased
item(s).
Like most retail stores, I would start the day with a certain amount of
cash in the drawer. By the end of the day, there would usually be a lot
more cash in the drawer, which then in turn would need to be counted
carefully and put into a bag to be put in the safe each night.
If customers chose to pay by check, I had to run the check through a
MICR reader which would put the data into the POS system. I often had
to call in the check to make sure there was sufficient funding in the
check writer's account. This would never fail to frustrate the
customer, as they wrote a check for a DVD or something small, and then
they had to wait 5+ minutes so finish their purchase. I would always
end up apologizing for the wait; it was a never-ending cycle.
"How are you paying for this today, sir? Credit card? Fantastic!"
Credit cards and gift cards were by far the simplest and most efficient
way to pay for an item at the store. I simply would check the
customer's ID to make sure they were indeed the cardholder, and run the
card, have them sign real quick, and boom...all set! Gift cards were
even easier to use because they required no identification, since the
store had already received payment for it.
The point here is that obviously electronic transactions are much less
of a burden for customers AND employees. Plus, electronic transactions
are able to be tracked, verified and create a layer of fraud
prevention, automatically.
Paperless isn't the future, it is NOW.
-Nick