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by ariasemi
990 days ago
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Love your comment but I'm not entirely convinced that it is necessarily a phenomena unique to Japan culture. I mean, isn't it the same as the old saying "if it ain't broke..."? Using your example and this is just a guess, at the time Japan implemented those automated machines there was probably a big push to make the switch as manual handling of change had become a source of stress. The rest of the world didn't make that jump until cards were a thing, product of a similar experience. But by that time in Japan, where the problem was already "solved", switching to cards was no longer that big of a jump and so there was no incentive (or at least not enough) to worth the effort in changing technologies. |
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In London “oyster” contactless cards replaced cash/paper tickets for buses and the tube. It was then incremented to contactless bank payment cards as soon as the banks added such cards. This seemed largely to be an internal systems upgrade leveraging existing infrastructure.
Japanese suica/pasmo contactless payment cards are more like oyster and need topping up. Their bank payment cards are incompatible with international contactless systems. International contactless cards don’t work locally on many payment terminals.
Many retailers that support both local and international cards literally have mutiple contactless terminals. Some manage to take a contactless payment but then print a bit of paper for you to sign (total WTF moment!!).
But this post was originally about trees. And what I was getting at was the culture reveres preserving and optimising paths after those paths stop making sense or become obsolete. Some of that is very cool to see but I’m not sure if it’s going to be sustainable given their decline.