money changing

One of the things I like about fairs and amusement arcades is the way they have a slightly different sense of money. Arcades almost always drive you to the change machine to get piles of metal to shove into the slotties. Which makes money much more tangible than it normally is. It must be one of the frictional drags on their business. Both the palaver people have to go through to pay and the business of collecting, storing, counting and doling out physical cash.

Clearly they're not the only people who have to worry about this. Visa and Oyster are doing all sorts of cashless things. And the phone and other companies are working on it too, which of course they've already done in many bits of the world.

Even Westminster council is doing things , they're about to remove loads of parking meters and replace them with 'pay by phone'.

But I think I was struck most forcibly by the whole thing when we went to the winter fair in Hyde Park yesterday. Most fairs now have a system where you have to buy tokens to pay for rides - presumably to stop petty theft among the people running each ride. I always liked those tokens, they were like play money but they had real value. It made you think about the actual value of money a little bit. At this fair though, these were the tokens you had to buy. You could see why they'd do it, easy to administer, less bulk to deal with. And, these expire that day, so, if you're left with one over, as we were, they're very happy. This must be a transitional stage though, it can't be long before these things are contactless; just swipe a card or a phone and get on-board. I can see the advantages of that for customer and ride-people but I hope someone's giving some thought to creating some digital ephemera to replace the tokens and tickets some of us love to keep for souvenirs.

Comments

[Timo]

We are actively designing what you might call contactless ephemera :)

Here is some I've collected from around the world:
http://flickr.com/photos/timo/1616057288/

There is huge potential there, given that RFID can be made to look like almost anything...

[Shanderson]

My daughter has a tamagotchi and when we visit virtual tamagotchi town we play the games and visit the own hall or the dance club we get what they call souveniers that when we log out it gives us a code so that we can download the little icon to her handheld game. It could work the same way. when you swipe your phone it ask is you want a digital keepsake to remember your visit, ride , trip whatever. Great to collect or trade virtual cards hmmm.