You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days. Additionally, the ability to pay in cash isn’t needed for buying coffee, it’s needed for paying for legal defense, publishing, transport, and a bunch of other things. The issue isn’t that Starbucks is cashless; the issue is that when all of society goes cashless (because places like Starbucks did) then we are all capital-f Fucked.
Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.
>You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days.
This is 100% false. I do gift card reselling and buy 6 figures worth of gift cards per year. Sometimes places like Dollar General require ID, but CVS, Staples, Grocery Stores, etc. almost never ask for ID. When they do it is to match to the name on the credit card to prevent people buying gift cards with stolen credits cards, not to enter into any sort of tracking database. You can easily buy hundreds of dollars of gift cards in a single transaction with no ID check if using cash.
They (CVS) require a phone number.