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by Freak_NL 105 days ago
In Europe? Debit cards. Hardly anyone uses a credit card in a supermarket.

If I'm going out I'll have both a debit card and cash in my wallet. Given that large scale outages of payment networks are no longer theoretical but to be expected, not carrying cash is just silly. Since I have a wallet in any case, I see no point in using contactless payments on a smartphone — I usually don't take it with me when getting groceries.

I have no idea if I can even do contactless phone payments on GrapheneOS, but since everything else works (including my bank's app), I don't care.

1 comments

> In Europe? Debit cards. Hardly anyone uses a credit card in a supermarket.

Such sweeping statements are impossible for "Europe". It's a big place. Plenty of people use credit cards in supermarkets. But it's orthogonal to the discussion. A creditcard can be contactless or on a phone. Or on a watch.

Of course it is a big place. It is also a big place where credit cards just aren't a thing for most people:

https://n26.com/en-eu/blog/taboo-of-credit

That article lists some reasons why using a credit card doesn't make sense in most European countries. It's not a way to build up your credit score for one. As a Dutchman, the only way I can lower my credit score is by taking on debts (with the exception of a mortgage).

The US is a big place too. I am fairly comfortable in making the sweeping statement that credit cards are a thing used by many people there.

> It is also a big place where credit cards just aren't a thing for most people

Nonsense. It's hard to find actual statistics on the number of credit cards, but it's obvious that the Netherlands are an outlier, with a paltry 0.02 credit cards per capita, vs Luxemburg's 3.98 (wtf). If I filter out the non-EU countries from the dataset below, I end up with 0.5 credit cards per capita. That's nowhere near "not a thing for most people". They're just "not a thing" in NL. Big difference.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1395502/credit-cards-in-...

If 25 people have 4 credit cards each and 75 people have none, then we have 1 card/capita, but only 25% of the population uses credit cards.

The median seems to be 0.25 cards/capita. Your own source already ~agrees that they're "not a thing for most people" (if we're really pedantic we can start looking at populations of those countries), but to find a more realistic estimate for the percentage of the population who use credit cards we would have to divide this figure by the average number of credit cards among people who have at least one.