It is a double-edged sword. I remember that I couldn’t shop at Coop for several days in Sweden because there was a major failure in the digital payment system. And because Sweden, in general, is no longer at all designed for cash, the stores were simply closed. Let the ice cream shop have no access to the payment service for a week, and there will be a cash register on the table faster than you can put a scoop of ice cream in the cone.
The story becomes all the more hypocritical when one advocates giving up cash but still keeps silver, gold, or other precious metals in the safe for security. I’m not accusing anyone here, but I know such specialists.
There are certainly things I want to buy without anyone seeing my payment data... and no, I don’t mean bribe the construction worker. Cash also has something to do with privacy.
Of course, one could easily abolish copper coins. The smallest coin in Sweden is 1 krona, comparable to our 10 cents. There is nothing smaller, and at the cash register prices are rounded up or down.
But that only works with an unexcitable people like the Swedes. In Germany, it would immediately teleport in professional critics who would argue that then you’d be overpaying when buying a liter of milk for 1.46 EUR... or that supermarkets would use big data to set prices so that on average you’d earn rather than overpay.
On the other hand, penny-pinchers and pedants would of course always shop in such a way that the bill ends up exactly xx.x4 EUR and is thus rounded down. 4 cents profit per purchase... which is, of course, diminished by the fact that prices are generally raised in the first place because retailers also have to round down.
I consider it impossible that we would even abolish the 1-cent coins.