CASH
Legal tender made from fiber-based paper. Also known as dough, moolah, dinero, dosh, paper, greenbacks, clams, beans, bucks, dead presidents, spondulicks, lettuce, cheese, bread, the long green, scrilla, smackers, or bacon.
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Take a good whiff of that greenback-if you actually have any in your wallet, that is. The aroma might just take you back to a time of savings pass books (in lieu of an online savings account), rolling quarters (instead of hitting the Coinstar change counting machines), and trips to Europe when you could actually afford a Madeleine.
Everything we know about the dollar is shifting faster than the exchange rate. Bills and coins used to be symbols of great wealth, but, today, if you have money to spare, it's likely that you'll hardly have any bills on you, if only because sitting on that fat a wallet will lead to sciatica. Want to buy your house in cold hard cash? If the seller accepts it, you'll need some serious biceps in order to heave that many bills over the threshold. Even the color that launched a dozen nicknames-the green stuff, lettuce, cabbage-is itself dated. The new twenties are kind of pinkish and periwinkle, and the new fives are… um, is anyone still able to live off of bills other than twenties?
Coins aren't faring any better. Pennies, once so inexpensive to make that their production actually turned a profit for the government, now cost more than a cent to make; because the pre–1982 ones were mostly copper, they are now worth nearly three times as much as the one-cent printed on them. Some military bases have already experimented with getting rid of the smallest coins. Things aren't looking much better for nickels: In 2008, they cost almost ten cents each to produce.
In the mid-2000s, Las Vegas and Atlantic City both introduced slot machines that dispense vouchers instead of clanking coins, which somehow seems to rob the soul as much as it does the wallet. Fake money seems doomed as well: Some editions of Monopoly have completely done away with the colored money. As if the banker's job wasn't sweet enough, she now gets to go all Arthur Andersen on her opponents, inserting players' "credit cards" in a handheld machine, checking a balance which only she can see, and then deducting or adding denominations (which, in the new version, are seriously adjusted for inflation). It's all a little too much like real life.
Checks are facing a similar demise, replaced instead by online transactions that are instant and therefore give the money's recipients more confidence that the funds actually exist. Utilities still take them, but in many stores they're now about as useful as trying to buy toilet paper with a handshake. Still, we do love our credit cards. Sure you can't fold them into ad hoc bowties, but they are quite handy. They buy us books on Amazon! Movie tickets! College educations! They, too, however, may soon be good for little more than tooth picking. We're already seeing the black strips on their backs replaced with small chips that can be waved in front of a cash register, rendering the entire swiping action unnecessary. Those thumbnail-sized chips can be embedded in many things other than pieces of flat plastic: Thanks to technology currently being tested in several states, a simple tap of a cell phone will likely be the way your average shopper will pay for things in coming years. After that, the next logical development would seem to be technology that automatically deducts funds from your checking account when you simply think about what you want to buy. Wait-isn't that what the Internet is for?
