[Broken_Hippo]

I live in Norway, and cannot remember the last time my card wouldn't work - period. Not just with the reasons stated.

When I lived in the states and worked retail, your cash wouldn't be accepted at a lot of stores if the power was out (or if internet/phone lines caused the registers to fail). To complicate things, I worked in a pharmacy, so accepting cash for the medicine without it going through the system might have actually been illegal.