It is interesting that the first thing society makes frictionless with technology is payments, easing consumerism. Perhaps we should have aimed to make other things frictionless, such as: seeking good medical and dental care, buying less disposable packaging, choosing products that are sustainable. Or what about spending time in nature? That should be easy for everyone with a safe and decent-sized park within walking distance of anyone's home.
Nope, it's consumerism that we are easing. It goes to show you the true priorities of the techno-industrial society!
This is an overly cynical view in my opinion. Firstly, payments is certainly not the first thing we made frictionless using technology. Reducing friction for things is not at all a new trend. Heck, just take a closer look at the device being used for Apple Pay: a Cell Phone! A technology that made it easier to talk to anybody, anywhere!
Secondly, automating payments is just an easier accomplishment than automating access to healthcare. With healthcare, you need to find the right provider, and do a bunch of other non-trivial things. Payments boils down to moving numbers from one ledger to another which is much easier. So of course society accomplished that before automating access to healthcare. It does not at all mean that society doesn't value healthcare
The first thing made frictionless by the Internet is probably communications. And yes payments is something that can be solved mostly inside of a computer so it's much simpler than healthcare.
I am 37 years old and I have never ever found payments to have any friction, my 1950s/1960s parents feel the same with the credit card being the last significant technological advancement.
All the rest have been many but minor quality of life improvements here and there, but payments have been frictionless for as long as I remember.
Using my phone to pay is pretty low friction. There's literal friction to pulling anything out, but the phone comes out much more easily than the financial xenomorph of pulling my wallet out, then pulling a card out of the wallet. Then I have to stab the chip end in a reader since I have yet to find one that supports tap to pay.
Taking your example of visiting a park: due to technology (having a device like a smartphone), I can arrive in a town and immediately see visually in which direction to walk so that I get to a park, having never set foot in the place before (I literally did this yesterday). Without that technology, this would only be possible after finding a shop which sells maps of the locality. Which is the more consumerist situation?
But phones aren't free, they have both significant up-front and recurring expenses. Trading "I need to buy a map" for "I need to buy a phone so I can look at a map" isn't a straight win.
And at the same time, before phones, every municipality had a place with free maps of major landmarks, precisely because they want to encourage tourism without forcing people to buy a local map.
The situation of needing to own a phone in order to participate in society is similar to how here in the US we require people to own cars to participate in society; it is a financial burden whose effects are felt disproportionately by those who are less wealthy.
Your examples don't make sense to me. Everything you list is either something which was made frictionless by the invention of the web (searching for doctors and dentists, choosing sustainable products) or something that cannot be made frictionless by technology, only by government (building more parks).
The article seems to define frictionless as "significantly improved", so maybe that's where the confusion lies. Their example of a frictionless technology is something that takes 30 seconds using a phone versus 40 seconds using a credit card. I'd take issue with whether that really means without friction, or even whether that's a significant improvement at all, but that is their definition, so I'm going with it.
All of these things (healthcare, buying products...) require money transfer. So by making payments frictionless, you're diminishing friction in these things too.
There have been attempts at making it easier to seek medical care. There are services which give you online access to quick scheduling and even online prescriptions for common problems. I think the major barriers are due to regulations and inflexibility of existing structures.
I think that the increasing role of physician assistants could could make health care more affordable and thus reduce friction. There's a lot of common ailments that people seek treatment for that have a prescribed treatment protocol that doesn't require a specialist MD. In theory it should make healthcare more affordable to people since PA's don't make as much as doctors and don't require as much schooling. What I'm not sure about is whether the consumer is seeing any of the cost savings, or is it all getting captured by hospitals/intermediaries?
My primary care pretty much switched to supervising a few PAs in his practice and I've been pretty happy with the quality and price.
I didn't even know that PAs existed when I went to school because I think it would have been a decent career for myself. I think about it as an alternative plan after the next time I get laid off.
> It is interesting that the first thing society makes frictionless with technology is payments, easing consumerism. Perhaps we should have aimed to make other things frictionless
By "society" and "we" I assume you are talking about American society?
Because there are many societies that prioritize and in fact have already done these things.
One could argue that America lags far behind other much more modern societies in virtually every metric that isn't "number of billionaires"
It's not really clear from the article but I imagine that frictionless payments online contribute a lot more than physical ones. If you're making the decision between using a physical credit card and your phone then you've likely already committed to making the purchase. But it's a lot easier to back out when you're online. The option to use Apple or Google Pay on a website (even if you have your cards saved in the browser and it's just a few clicks to autofill) is so easy.
To add to that, installment plans that are offered on pretty much every purchase nowadays just compound the problem.
Per my anecdotal experience, this is same with credit cards versus cash and before that checks/cheques versus cash had the same effect. The joke "I still have cheques, that means I still have money" or some variant, refers to this frictionless behavior.
With lack of basic personal money management education, it is a permanent, lifelong indebtedness for a very large portion of the population.
The headline sounds like it means some places charge more to people paying with their phone. This is not what the article is about. The article is about how people are apparently buying more stuff because payment is easier.
I imagine not having to physically forking out the notes and coins from the one you have in your pocket/wallet, where you can literally see your money supply diminishing, also has something to do with that.
I do believe that some people account for money that way, but for me it's the opposite:
On my credit card statement or bank account, I can at the end of the month see in detail how much I've spent, broken down by category and merchant; with cash, it all just shows up as "ATM withdrawals" and I have no sense for where it all went.
UPI payments in India have enabled seamless mobile payments through qr code scanning.
Since the bank account is debited directly, it is difficult to get an idea of monthly spending until we check the account statement and it is easy to overspend.
Ever since I've started using UPI lite which is a prepaid wallet that has limits on both max prepaid balance and max amount per transaction, I guess the extra friction and the very visible balance made me rethink some purchases.
Most banks I've used offer some sort of budgeting feature that lets you track where money is going in real time. Is that not common with Indian banks, or do the UPI bookings not happen in real time?
UPI is real time. Most banking applications do offer a feature to categorize card spends in a time period but not UPI as they are typically peer-to-peer transactions.
If you mean envelope budgeting type feature, I'm not aware of any.
> It takes about 40 seconds to buy something with a physical credit card, compared to just 30 seconds to buy it with a smartphone.
Looking at the linked paper, it suggests someone was able to make a cash payment in 5 seconds (see table 2). Where the closest of other methods would be a contactless card of about 21 seconds. Just have exact change in hand! Cash also has the highest time of 244 seconds.
Easy enough in places that incorporate tax into the list price, but this is next to impossible in the US. You'd have to know what the city, county, and state sales taxes add up to (accounting for any products that have a different sales tax than others!) and then do the math with the weirdly specific percentage(s) that results (again, taking into account that some items are taxed differently!) to come up with your exact change.
These days it's more like five minutes while the kid calls the assistant manager over to teach them how to count money. Paying cash today is about as convenient as paying with giant stone coins.
I think it's because China is in deflation, so they simply want to spend more. Unlike the US and Europe with inflation and tipping culture, even though they pay with smartphones they still don't want to spend a lot of money.
Shouldn’t deflation cause people to want to spend less? Spending deflating money is throwing out an appreciating asset. Japan used to suffer from long-term deflation and I’ve heard people there were generally frugal in reaction to that. Vice versa, holding on to money during inflation makes you just lose money, since tomorrow you won't be able to afford the things you can afford today.
Yeah, this was a primary goal of at least 'Click to Pay'. Lots of people abandon carts once they hit the screen that requires payment details because the 'wallet is too far away.'. Or requires registration, payment info capture, etc. Mobile wallet apps address the same convenience factor (as the article mentions).
Another goal was to prevent merchants from getting and storing your payment information. So that's perhaps a plus.
I worked on SRC (the EMV spec Click to Pay implements) at Amex.
> Lots of people abandon carts once they hit the screen that requires payment details because the 'wallet is too far away.'.
I don't know if it's just me, but I often "abandon" my cart once I hit the screen that requires payment details because I had to get there in order to see how much shipping I'm going to have to pay.
Then I can do the whole process again with a few other stores until I can compare which of them gives me the best price.
It's also often only on the payment screen that you can discover whether or not they even ship to your place.
Likewise with 'coupon codes' - they are usually supposed to be entered at the final stage before paying. You don't know if the coupon code has expired or whether it is valid for that shop until the last moment.
> A secondary goal was to prevent merchants from getting and storing your payment information. So that's perhaps a plus.
Can Google or Apple see what is being purchased through those apps? I'm assuming not, but not knowing the answer to this has kept me using my credit card to tap with since that method doesn't add yet another company into the mix (at least as far as I know). Especially one, in the case of Google, whose main business model is selling my information to others or using it to target me for ads.
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Nope, it's consumerism that we are easing. It goes to show you the true priorities of the techno-industrial society!
Secondly, automating payments is just an easier accomplishment than automating access to healthcare. With healthcare, you need to find the right provider, and do a bunch of other non-trivial things. Payments boils down to moving numbers from one ledger to another which is much easier. So of course society accomplished that before automating access to healthcare. It does not at all mean that society doesn't value healthcare
Seems like the phone made it easier to disconnect from the people around us by giving us too many options, IMO. It's more just to ease commercialism.
All the rest have been many but minor quality of life improvements here and there, but payments have been frictionless for as long as I remember.
And at the same time, before phones, every municipality had a place with free maps of major landmarks, precisely because they want to encourage tourism without forcing people to buy a local map.
The situation of needing to own a phone in order to participate in society is similar to how here in the US we require people to own cars to participate in society; it is a financial burden whose effects are felt disproportionately by those who are less wealthy.
The article seems to define frictionless as "significantly improved", so maybe that's where the confusion lies. Their example of a frictionless technology is something that takes 30 seconds using a phone versus 40 seconds using a credit card. I'd take issue with whether that really means without friction, or even whether that's a significant improvement at all, but that is their definition, so I'm going with it.
I didn't even know that PAs existed when I went to school because I think it would have been a decent career for myself. I think about it as an alternative plan after the next time I get laid off.
By "society" and "we" I assume you are talking about American society?
Because there are many societies that prioritize and in fact have already done these things.
One could argue that America lags far behind other much more modern societies in virtually every metric that isn't "number of billionaires"
As someone who works in security and privacy, it always stands out to me when the "and privacy" part is left off.
To add to that, installment plans that are offered on pretty much every purchase nowadays just compound the problem.
With lack of basic personal money management education, it is a permanent, lifelong indebtedness for a very large portion of the population.
On my credit card statement or bank account, I can at the end of the month see in detail how much I've spent, broken down by category and merchant; with cash, it all just shows up as "ATM withdrawals" and I have no sense for where it all went.
UPI payments in India have enabled seamless mobile payments through qr code scanning.
Since the bank account is debited directly, it is difficult to get an idea of monthly spending until we check the account statement and it is easy to overspend.
Ever since I've started using UPI lite which is a prepaid wallet that has limits on both max prepaid balance and max amount per transaction, I guess the extra friction and the very visible balance made me rethink some purchases.
If you mean envelope budgeting type feature, I'm not aware of any.
Looking at the linked paper, it suggests someone was able to make a cash payment in 5 seconds (see table 2). Where the closest of other methods would be a contactless card of about 21 seconds. Just have exact change in hand! Cash also has the highest time of 244 seconds.
Easy enough in places that incorporate tax into the list price, but this is next to impossible in the US. You'd have to know what the city, county, and state sales taxes add up to (accounting for any products that have a different sales tax than others!) and then do the math with the weirdly specific percentage(s) that results (again, taking into account that some items are taxed differently!) to come up with your exact change.
Try doing that with a week's worth of groceries.
Another goal was to prevent merchants from getting and storing your payment information. So that's perhaps a plus.
I worked on SRC (the EMV spec Click to Pay implements) at Amex.
I don't know if it's just me, but I often "abandon" my cart once I hit the screen that requires payment details because I had to get there in order to see how much shipping I'm going to have to pay.
Then I can do the whole process again with a few other stores until I can compare which of them gives me the best price.
It's also often only on the payment screen that you can discover whether or not they even ship to your place.
According to some market papers, this is stealing from the retailer or something. Lol
Can Google or Apple see what is being purchased through those apps? I'm assuming not, but not knowing the answer to this has kept me using my credit card to tap with since that method doesn't add yet another company into the mix (at least as far as I know). Especially one, in the case of Google, whose main business model is selling my information to others or using it to target me for ads.
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Best I can think of is that it somehow indicates disagreement with the state of the world that has brought about the experience or facts relayed...?