The spread of COVID-19 is likely to accelerate our path towards a cashless economy - and it could cost us, University of Wollongong Professor Charles Areni said.
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Professor Areni, executive dean of the Faculty of Business at UOW, said already under 30 per cent of transactions in Australia were made in cash, and our "irrational" response - based on fear rather than science - would cause this trend to accelerate.
"What the coronavirus is likely to do is spur a whole lot of irrational fear," he said on Wednesday.
"Consumers have a natural aversion to touching anything that they think has been touched by other people in the marketplace.
"If I use cash, then it's fairly obvious that when I get change, I'm dealing with all the notes, all of the coins, the retail employee, all of the people who ever held those coins and those notes, and that can fuel an irrational fear, that says 'I'd rather pull out a card with a chip on it, or pull out my phone and activate a banking app, so I don't have to touch other people.
"I'm certainly not an expert in the extent to which handling cash ... what the risk is in terms of catching coronavirus or any other illness. But consumers will behave in the marketplace not according to what medical evidence says, but by what they perceive as the risk. They're going to be driven by their perception and the real medical evidence isn't going to drive the behaviour."
But there would be costs - the "anonymous purchase" would become harder, and some less-equipped people may be further alienated.
"There are a lot of purchases we make where we don't necessarily want spouses, or employers, or other parties, to know that we've made that purpose," Prof Areni said.
"If I wonder past the pub, I might go in for two or three schooners, and I might not want my wife to know that's what I've done.
"With the cashless economy, you give up that. So it's likely that as we move to a cashless economy, we're going to shrink the economy, because those kind of anonymous purchases are harder to make.
"We're also likely to [shrink the economy] with older consumers, and consumers that have lower socioeconomic status, because while we're all banked up, and have the technology, the card, there are sectors of Australian society that don't necessarily have an alternative to the good old fashioned banknote."
While Australia is a world leader in the rush away from cash, Professor Areni said the fear of disease hadn't shown up as a prime cause.
"It certainly hasn't made it as a major factor in research," he said.
"In [financial research] reports, you don't find people talking about contagious diseases. It hasn't been identified as a major factor. It probably will now - but then again the coronavirus is changing a lot of things about how consumers behave in the marketplace.
"It's likely to be a factor that affects a lot of consumer behaviours, with the common thing being 'I don't want to be around other people'. I can behave in the marketplace [such that] I don't want to touch things that a lot of other people have touched, or that I perceive a lot of other people have touched.
"Those two things are going to change a lot of marketplace behaviour."