What other countries are you comparing to? I did a multi year assignment in Germany and holy fucking hell does their banking system suck. It took weeks for my checks to be deposited and reconciliation times were longer. Not defending the US here by my only non-US banking experience was atrocious.

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cycomanic 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The question is why did you use cheques? I don't know anyone who is not American who has used cheques in the last 20 years or so. I have not been living in Germany in a long time so I can't talk much about the banking system, but I have had transfers with German friends and family which never took more than maybe a day or 2 within Europe.

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consp 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You take a bad example and compare it to another bad example. Germany is well known to be behind the curve like the US. It's the only western European country I still bring a healthy amount cash when I go there. Wouldn't be the first time I had to pay parking with cash in recent times. Every where else this is a non issue. It's rapidly changing though, but I don't like the common in use PIN terminals as they have no way of hiding the PIN entry.

	▲	cycomanic 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Now I'm not generally a big defender of Germany, but the reason for much more prevalent use of cash is largely privacy in Germany. And I sort of agree that handing all monetary transactions to the mastercard/visa duopoly is a terrible idea. We are essentially trading the convinience of a tap for increased prices and unelected gatekeepers that can (and will) easily push sectors out of business, because they don't like what they do. Regarding the parking, I much rather would be able to pay with cash than the $2 parking plus 50 cents cc transaction fee that you have to pay in many places in NZ.