I have some really big news, you guys! It turns out that if you ask people whether they want to leave their wallets at home, 83 percent of them will say yes! And sometimes, people won’t have cash with them, so they can’t make a purchase — in fact, that’s what happened to a whopping 75 percent of Canadians! What a crazy, backwards world we live in!
Even more astounding: If you buy a meal for a friend, it’s possible that they won’t pay you back! Shockingly, 54 percent of Americans say that they’ve been “stiffed” at some point in their lives!
Isn’t that amazing? I mean, if those numbers — from a Wakefield Research study conducted for PayPal — don’t totally spell “doom for the wallet,” I don’t know what does! So if you want to join me in the future, go ahead, burn your cash and use your smartphone to pay for everything! Doom for the wallet, man!
What’s that, friendly merchant? I can’t use my phone to pay here? Didn’t you see the survey showing that wallets are totally annoying? Sorry, I must have misheard you — no, it isn’t just a silly press release designed to drum up publicity for upcoming PayPal products and services.
Are you really trying to argue with science?
(Sorry to pick on you, PayPal. Clearly there’s a whole genre of annoying press releases describing studies that don’t really prove much of anything, and hey, at least it wasn’t an infographic. Still this one was a pretty perfect example of the form.)
(And yes, TechCrunch both criticizes and covers studies likes this. But to paraphrase one of my favorite writers: That doesn’t make us hypocrites. It just means we have layers.)
