CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Cash at the Counter

NARRATOR: Not long ago, a five-dollar bill could buy a coffee almost anywhere in the country. Today, a growing number of cafés, parking lots and even farmers' market stalls display a polite but firm notice: card or phone only. Retailers describe the shift as an inevitable evolution; detractors regard it as something closer to quiet exclusion, and several municipalities are now weighing whether businesses ought to be compelled to accept legal tender.

NARRATOR: Economist Marguerite Lavoie, who studies consumer payments, is among the most articulate defenders of the right to refuse it. Cash, in her view, is an expense that never appears on a price tag: bills must be counted, stored, insured and transported to the bank, and none of that is visible to customers, who assume the coins in their hand cost the merchant nothing. Premises holding substantial amounts of currency also tend to attract robberies, and employees at card-only shops report feeling far safer at closing time. Processing fees on digital transactions, typically a few percent per sale, are hardly trivial, yet Lavoie maintains that proprietors, not legislators, are best positioned to weigh one burden against another.

NARRATOR: Community advocate Desmond Achebe finds that reasoning plainly one-sided. A small but stubborn share of Canadian adults, he notes, have no bank account at all, and many more deliberately rely on bills and coins to keep a precarious household budget from unravelling. For them, a card-only sign is not an inconvenience; it is a closed door. Achebe also raises a subtler objection. Every electronic purchase leaves a record, and he questions whether ordinary citizens should be obliged to surrender that trail of information merely to buy groceries. Then again, a vendor selling preserves from a folding table is hardly a supermarket, he observes, and a blanket obligation might crush the very entrepreneurs it claims to protect.

NARRATOR: Lavoie's own research, meanwhile, complicates her case. The customers most disadvantaged by the transition tend to be elderly or low-income, and they were seldom consulted. Her remedy is not a mandate, but wider access to free basic bank accounts and prepaid cards.

NARRATOR: Whether that would suffice is debatable. Prepaid cards must still be loaded, often for a fee, and they do nothing to allay Achebe's apprehensions about surveillance. Perhaps the more pertinent question is not whether cash is old-fashioned, but whether anyone should be turned away from the corner store because of how they choose to pay.