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Coin Stroking
Jul. 13th, 2021 02:32 pmI used to have a tag “Mocking E-book coverage” — it’s been “e-book coverage” for a while now, but it used to be “Mocking e-book coverage” in which I talked a lot about book huffing. I stopped some time around 2015, after posting on the topic for over 5 years.
Looking back at those entries, I see very clearly how I did not _start_ with the term “book huffing” — I got there by degrees. Initially, I thought about it in terms of the change in default from a “book’ being default paper to being default electronic, and I thought of it as Another Adoption Curve. Partway through the process, however, I started taking the whole thing very personally, in the sense of, I Was Personally Outraged / Enraged / WTF by articles that were basically, But I Like Books As Objects. I called this kind of behavior Book Huffing, because while a lot of people talked about touching books, a _lot_ of them talked about the way books smelled. Given my issues with cigarette smoke and mold, and a long history of having to buy second hand because I could not afford new, let’s just say that I’d like to never have to smell a book ever again, thank you very much.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-money-is-no-object-11625839202
I need a new term. And the new term I need is Coin Stroking. I’m told that coin collecting infomercials have become a staple of off-hours at Bloomberg (I hear this from friends on the West Coast, whose position in the time zones means afternoon / evening / weekend Bloomberg consumption efforts most often encounter paid programming — I’m on the East Coast, and I go to bed early, so I don’t see as much). But here are some examples from the WSJ article:
“Using piggy banks … children put away a penny or a nickel at a time, savoring each clank … parents bought mechanical cast-iron banks [for kids who] placed a coin in Santa Claus’s hand and laughed as he dropped it down a chimney into the bank’s base—or perhaps you put a coin in an eagle’s mouth and marveled as it leaned down to feed the money to its chicks, who audibly chirped for more. [Me: there are electronic versions of these now — my daughter has one.] … [people] opened a Christmas Club account … A regular weekly deposit of a few cents, typically pressed into a colorful cardboard folder, would grow by year’s end into enough money to buy a present for the holidays.“
Savoring. Clank. Leaning down. Audibly chirped. Pressed into a colorful Cardboard folder. These are tactile memories, abetted by sound with some taste tossed in for metaphorical flavor.
Please do not eat coins. Zinc can be very bad for you. I have a ton of memories of pennies as a kid, and yes, we ate them. We ate all kinds of weird stuff when I was a kid, including, memorably, tacks, and it is a Thing that some kids do, and it definitely changed how I parented — but also, I mostly made sure my kids had so much food that the impulse to put stuff in the mouth was still present, but the inclination to swallow was now. Needless to say, when you try to trigger sense memories of coins for me, it is not going to a Happy Place. I mostly think of things like getting in trouble for putting a coin in to get candy from a machine, or wondering what a cigarette machine was for, or putting coins in a claw machine and getting yelled at for that, and then, later, how dirty coins are, as I rolled them or unrolled them while working as a cashier. And how relentless the waves of cash, folding green stuff and coins, were, working as a cashier at a sold out multi-plex or at Woolworth’s at the holidays. Back then, the credit card slider-thingie was even worse, but now, the pristine glory of a payment card terminal is a thing of beauty. My purse is lighter. I don’t have to constantly straighten, flatten, rearrange. I don’t have to remember to spend down the small change so it doesn’t build up. I just dump it all in the next tip jar I encounter and only keep the bills.
I struggle to imagine the person on the planet — they might exist! China creates billionaires, and that’s where I would look for them — who has been poorer than me and more inclined to save every last cent and consider where it will go next, and who became richer than me, and more concerned with how to reduce the amount of time and energy I sink into managing the money. I’ve got a very large range of experience. Also, I have been actively reading researching, books, and psychological commentary on how humans interact with money and how it affects their intimate relationships for three decades (money blew up my first marriage, so I wanted to make sure I understood what the hell was going on). The general thrust of this article — that people behave differently with payment cards than with cash, and by sunsetting cash, we might be losing something important — is one I am quite familiar with, and one I have always been skeptical of. I got my first (store credit card) payment card as a teenager, and I Managed Just Fine, thank you; my first husband got his first payment card around the same age, and a few years ago I was poking around on the King County courthouse search engine and learned that his wages had been garnished to pay a credit card. I don’t think this has a whole lot to do with whether you use cash or whether you use credit cards, but I will observe how shocked I was that he and his sister were regularly handed cash by their grandparents for no reason at all — and they shopped at Nordstrom’s and never worried about whether an item was on sale or, really, what it cost at all. (They were not rich. My then FIL described himself as a Poor Dirt Farmer of the Sea. They were commercial fisherman, and then later they got CDLs and drove dump trucks. They transitioned by “accidentally” having both of their boats be destroyed totally and collecting the insurance pool money.)
The sourcing in this article is interesting. The most recent article mentioned is the source of most of the other linked items. And honestly, none of it is all that recent. There are a number of things that better explain the difference between how people behave with payment cards vs. folding green stuff and coins, as compared to the nature of the payment itself.
First — and I think it’s pretty easy to underestimate the importance of this — payment cards are comparatively recent, and they went through some important phases in how they were adopted. Their earliest users were traveling businessmen (mostly men) — they don’t spend like Normal People, they don’t even spend while traveling like they spend at home. For one thing, Someone Else Is Paying if it is an expense account. The next group of users was a group of very well off people who found cash annoying anyway for the reasons that anyone with a lot of it finds it annoying (it’s dirty, and high-maintenance). Most of this group were “early adopters” and that crowd — by definition, is more prone to take risks.
Second, the credit card industry in particular went through a phase of Hook ‘Em Young, when they actively pushed credit cards at college students. So, there’s that. YEAH they will spend more than they have. Duh. That is, more or less, the definition of college student.
Three: We also had a period during which credit cards were the primary source of loans to entrepreneurs, and that was celebrated — and these have always been loans that had pretty nifty characteristics (they cannot take your house or car to make you pay up, and early on, you could write off the interest on your taxes, altho that didn’t last for very long).
It’s also worth noting that a lot of the earlier studies showing differences in behavior between using a payment card vs cash have been difficult to reproduce. There’s a bunch of stuff out there that suggests this phenomenon has attenuated or disappeared as people grew accustomed to payment cards and/or as more of the population participated.
And finally, EBT. Which of course makes absolutely no appearance in this discussion at all, because EBT is all about payment cards but exactly the kind of thing the WSJ would know nothing about.
Possibly I will add link fu. But maybe not. If you have any interest things to point to in the way of research or observations (or example of the coin stroking phenomenon), I’m interested! Share in the comments.
Looking back at those entries, I see very clearly how I did not _start_ with the term “book huffing” — I got there by degrees. Initially, I thought about it in terms of the change in default from a “book’ being default paper to being default electronic, and I thought of it as Another Adoption Curve. Partway through the process, however, I started taking the whole thing very personally, in the sense of, I Was Personally Outraged / Enraged / WTF by articles that were basically, But I Like Books As Objects. I called this kind of behavior Book Huffing, because while a lot of people talked about touching books, a _lot_ of them talked about the way books smelled. Given my issues with cigarette smoke and mold, and a long history of having to buy second hand because I could not afford new, let’s just say that I’d like to never have to smell a book ever again, thank you very much.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-money-is-no-object-11625839202
I need a new term. And the new term I need is Coin Stroking. I’m told that coin collecting infomercials have become a staple of off-hours at Bloomberg (I hear this from friends on the West Coast, whose position in the time zones means afternoon / evening / weekend Bloomberg consumption efforts most often encounter paid programming — I’m on the East Coast, and I go to bed early, so I don’t see as much). But here are some examples from the WSJ article:
“Using piggy banks … children put away a penny or a nickel at a time, savoring each clank … parents bought mechanical cast-iron banks [for kids who] placed a coin in Santa Claus’s hand and laughed as he dropped it down a chimney into the bank’s base—or perhaps you put a coin in an eagle’s mouth and marveled as it leaned down to feed the money to its chicks, who audibly chirped for more. [Me: there are electronic versions of these now — my daughter has one.] … [people] opened a Christmas Club account … A regular weekly deposit of a few cents, typically pressed into a colorful cardboard folder, would grow by year’s end into enough money to buy a present for the holidays.“
Savoring. Clank. Leaning down. Audibly chirped. Pressed into a colorful Cardboard folder. These are tactile memories, abetted by sound with some taste tossed in for metaphorical flavor.
Please do not eat coins. Zinc can be very bad for you. I have a ton of memories of pennies as a kid, and yes, we ate them. We ate all kinds of weird stuff when I was a kid, including, memorably, tacks, and it is a Thing that some kids do, and it definitely changed how I parented — but also, I mostly made sure my kids had so much food that the impulse to put stuff in the mouth was still present, but the inclination to swallow was now. Needless to say, when you try to trigger sense memories of coins for me, it is not going to a Happy Place. I mostly think of things like getting in trouble for putting a coin in to get candy from a machine, or wondering what a cigarette machine was for, or putting coins in a claw machine and getting yelled at for that, and then, later, how dirty coins are, as I rolled them or unrolled them while working as a cashier. And how relentless the waves of cash, folding green stuff and coins, were, working as a cashier at a sold out multi-plex or at Woolworth’s at the holidays. Back then, the credit card slider-thingie was even worse, but now, the pristine glory of a payment card terminal is a thing of beauty. My purse is lighter. I don’t have to constantly straighten, flatten, rearrange. I don’t have to remember to spend down the small change so it doesn’t build up. I just dump it all in the next tip jar I encounter and only keep the bills.
I struggle to imagine the person on the planet — they might exist! China creates billionaires, and that’s where I would look for them — who has been poorer than me and more inclined to save every last cent and consider where it will go next, and who became richer than me, and more concerned with how to reduce the amount of time and energy I sink into managing the money. I’ve got a very large range of experience. Also, I have been actively reading researching, books, and psychological commentary on how humans interact with money and how it affects their intimate relationships for three decades (money blew up my first marriage, so I wanted to make sure I understood what the hell was going on). The general thrust of this article — that people behave differently with payment cards than with cash, and by sunsetting cash, we might be losing something important — is one I am quite familiar with, and one I have always been skeptical of. I got my first (store credit card) payment card as a teenager, and I Managed Just Fine, thank you; my first husband got his first payment card around the same age, and a few years ago I was poking around on the King County courthouse search engine and learned that his wages had been garnished to pay a credit card. I don’t think this has a whole lot to do with whether you use cash or whether you use credit cards, but I will observe how shocked I was that he and his sister were regularly handed cash by their grandparents for no reason at all — and they shopped at Nordstrom’s and never worried about whether an item was on sale or, really, what it cost at all. (They were not rich. My then FIL described himself as a Poor Dirt Farmer of the Sea. They were commercial fisherman, and then later they got CDLs and drove dump trucks. They transitioned by “accidentally” having both of their boats be destroyed totally and collecting the insurance pool money.)
The sourcing in this article is interesting. The most recent article mentioned is the source of most of the other linked items. And honestly, none of it is all that recent. There are a number of things that better explain the difference between how people behave with payment cards vs. folding green stuff and coins, as compared to the nature of the payment itself.
First — and I think it’s pretty easy to underestimate the importance of this — payment cards are comparatively recent, and they went through some important phases in how they were adopted. Their earliest users were traveling businessmen (mostly men) — they don’t spend like Normal People, they don’t even spend while traveling like they spend at home. For one thing, Someone Else Is Paying if it is an expense account. The next group of users was a group of very well off people who found cash annoying anyway for the reasons that anyone with a lot of it finds it annoying (it’s dirty, and high-maintenance). Most of this group were “early adopters” and that crowd — by definition, is more prone to take risks.
Second, the credit card industry in particular went through a phase of Hook ‘Em Young, when they actively pushed credit cards at college students. So, there’s that. YEAH they will spend more than they have. Duh. That is, more or less, the definition of college student.
Three: We also had a period during which credit cards were the primary source of loans to entrepreneurs, and that was celebrated — and these have always been loans that had pretty nifty characteristics (they cannot take your house or car to make you pay up, and early on, you could write off the interest on your taxes, altho that didn’t last for very long).
It’s also worth noting that a lot of the earlier studies showing differences in behavior between using a payment card vs cash have been difficult to reproduce. There’s a bunch of stuff out there that suggests this phenomenon has attenuated or disappeared as people grew accustomed to payment cards and/or as more of the population participated.
And finally, EBT. Which of course makes absolutely no appearance in this discussion at all, because EBT is all about payment cards but exactly the kind of thing the WSJ would know nothing about.
Possibly I will add link fu. But maybe not. If you have any interest things to point to in the way of research or observations (or example of the coin stroking phenomenon), I’m interested! Share in the comments.