[rkagerer]

Nice things about checks:

  - not subject to the annoying daily / monthly limits of Interac eTransfers, EFT's, etc.
  - easy to hand to someone, especially where there's no internet
  - generally no extra fees
  - for B2B, pretty much everyone accepts them
  - post-dating (one tactic toward your question of how to deal with regular payments, eg. rent)
  - in the US, a picture of one (meeting certain criteria) has the same legal status as the original
  - float (not nice at all for you, but a not-insignificant revenue stream for your bank/insurance company/etc)

They also fostered a whole soup of fraud prevention practices that is mostly irrelevant to electronic payments yet still seems to pervade and add friction to them.