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The end of cash?

No it wouldn't, if the infrastructure crashes on this sort of scale your cash is worthless as everything else follows. Assuming you had more than £50 in cash anyway since you can't get any more, what good is that to a shop that can't access their account to credit or withdraw cash? That can't pay their staff, that can't pay their suppliers? Never mind impacts further up the supply chain.
People's use of cash would depend on how much faith they had that its value would be retained, wouldn't it? So it would probably depend on the exact situation.

If there were some kind of infrastructure disaster but I hoped that the system would be restored in a few days/weeks, and I owned a shop full of stuff, I'd probably accept cash in exchange for what I had there, at least for perishable stuff - what would my alternatives be?
 
People's use of cash would depend on how much faith they had that its value would be retained, wouldn't it? So it would probably depend on the exact situation.

If there were some kind of infrastructure disaster but I hoped that the system would be restored in a few days/weeks, and I owned a shop full of stuff, I'd probably accept cash in exchange for what I had there, at least for perishable stuff - what would my alternatives be?
exactly that for the perishables , but i suspect if you shop wasa corner shop, you;d also be sending crates of the tinned / shelf stable stuff out to your own storage unless you literally 'lived over the shop '
 
People's use of cash would depend on how much faith they had that its value would be retained, wouldn't it? So it would probably depend on the exact situation.

If there were some kind of infrastructure disaster but I hoped that the system would be restored in a few days/weeks, and I owned a shop full of stuff, I'd probably accept cash in exchange for what I had there, at least for perishable stuff - what would my alternatives be?
A couple of days maybe, but how are you getting a float each day? Or are you just negotiating a price for each item? How sustainable is that? And once most people have run out of the cash they have on hand how worth is it to stay open? This is of course assuming you don't just get looted.

At the end of the day the best thing for dealing with major infrastructure disruption is a stockpile of tinned food rather than cash. Although admittedly cash is easier to store.
 
No it wouldn't, if the infrastructure crashes on this sort of scale your cash is worthless as everything else follows. Assuming you had more than £50 in cash anyway since you can't get any more, what good is that to a shop that can't access their account to credit or withdraw cash? That can't pay their staff, that can't pay their suppliers? Never mind impacts further up the supply chain.

There's a lot of cash out there, short term it would probably increase in value and all those with their life savings stuffed in a suitcase would be millionaires, for a while at least depending how things panned out. What else is the shop keeper supposed to do, establish an elaborate system of bartering in the middle of a disaster?
 
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