At Shotton Cards, on the town’s high street, Lynne Whitehouse, 75, is stuffing her change back into her purse. “It’ll be the worst thing they ever do if they get rid of cash,” she says.
“I pay cash as much as I can,” she adds. “If I can get cash out, I’ll use it.
“You can have all your modern things,” Whitehouse, a retired chicken factory worker, says, but her fear is that technology can fail in a way that cold, hard cash cannot.
Last week, data from Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society, revealed that in 2024, for the third year in a row, cash use had increased, with nearly 33 million withdrawals made from Nationwide ATMs last year. The highest rises in cash withdrawals were in Chiswick in west London, and here in Shotton, in north Wales.
And on Monday, the Post Office revealed that £1bn had been withdrawn in cash at post offices in December – the first time on record that this has happened in a single month.
On Christmas Day alone, £3.7m in cash was withdrawn or deposited over the counter at the 1,300 branches that were open.
The increase in transactions in Shotton is probably in part due to two banks on the high street closing – Lloyds last March and NatWest the previous November; and, Whitehouse says, “they took their cash machines with them”.
Yet people here also say that, as budgets get tighter, paying with cash instead of cards helps them to manage their finances.
“We were shocked at Christmas,” says Carl Thompson at Buy, Sell, Trade pawnbrokers. “In December it was 85% cash. I’ve been in retail for 25 years and it’s never been known.”
Many of his customers come in to sell items because they are struggling, he says, and he suspects people are paying with cash because it helps them to budget.
“We’ve got a lot of people bringing things in to sell to pay an electricity bill,” he says. “It’s upsetting, and happening daily.”
“I had a woman come in to sell some plates to pay a £40 bill,” he adds. “They were only worth a fiver, but I gave her the £40 out of my own pocket.”
Some businesses here also encourage their customers to pay in cash – with overheads getting ever tighter, card processing fees are an expense they could do without.
Hasan Dabanli, at Head Chef Cafe and Restaurant, has introduced a loyalty scheme, giving customers a 5% discount if they pay in cash.
“We prefer cash,” he says. “Cash is king. When they pay card there’s a charge on the card payment, so some percentage is taken away.”
One of his customers, Emma McKenzie, 46, a school caretaker, has paid cash for her lunch today. “I mostly pay in cash,” she says, adding that it “definitely” helps her to budget.
Linda Watton, 63, a retired lab technician, says: “I prefer cash.” Walking down the high street, past what was once Lloyds Bank, she adds: “I do use card, but mostly cash.”
“Cash is king,” her husband, Mike Watton, 64, a retired steelworker says. “If you have cash in your pocket, if you go out with £300 and spend £20 and £20 and £20, you see it going down.
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“If you pay card you look at your bank and say: ‘Oh my God, what have I spent?’. I much prefer cash; I always have done, all my life.”
But on Shotton High Street, a generational divide is evident: young people universally say they normally pay with a card.
Student Maddie Shade, 18, says she “rarely” uses cash. “If I have it on me it’s because I’ve been given money for a present,” she adds.
Her friend Evie Thomas, 18, also a student, says she mostly uses Apple Pay, “just because it’s easier”.
Jamie Morris, also an 18-year-old student, prefers the convenience of card too. “With contactless it’s the exact amount,” he says. “With cash, you have to get change.”
Although he acknowledges budgeting with cash is easier “because you can see it better”, he says: “I check my bank quite a lot; I have tried to manage it better with online banking.”
Back at Shotton Cards, Robert Curran, 70, the proprietor, is not convinced that cash is enjoying any significant resurgence, precisely because he sees younger customers turning away from it.
He has had the shop for 45 years and predicts that cash will one day cease to exist, with his younger customers almost always paying with a bank card or often their phones.
“I’ve seen mostly elderly people with cash, but 90% of young ones are all working on card or phones,” he says.
“They’ll come in here and buy a 29p card on their card and I ask them if they have cash, because every transaction you have to pay for.
“It’s quite amazing how many people don’t have cash at all,” he says. “It’s a big change.”
