The days of pennies and small change rattling in pockets will become a thing of the past, thanks to the brave new world of a `cash-less society' to be pioneered in Ennis. - Headline on a now-defunct Ennis web-site.
Someone out there loves Visa Cash cards, though he's not exactly who the promoters of the cash-less society had in mind. And now even Art Becker, who runs a website in America for people who collect used money cards, is concerned.
"Collectors like to collect something that continues to be produced. Once a bank, or country, stops issuing Visa Cash, collector interest starts to slow down. It's a psychological phenomenon . . . "
Unfortunately for the promoters of the brave new cash-less society, human psychology is, so far, the tough nut that has yet to be cracked. Handed the future, and a wad of hype, the punters and merchants of Ennis and scores of other "electronic purse" trial locations have simply yawned.
It wasn't a want of trying, or a lack of enthusiasm, that jinxed the Ennis experiment with Visa Cash cards, which were used to buy anything from the newspaper to a round of drinks. The cards, linked to local bank accounts, which stored value up to £50, could be used in local shops, pubs and parking centres, and were either reloaded or thrown away when the money value ran out.
For a couple of weeks at least late last year, shoppers and school children had fun trying to match up to the hyped image of themselves as harbingers of the future. Ironically for Ireland's information age town, one item that was less than plentiful during the initial trial period was hard information. Few among the Ennis pioneers realised that scores of trials, just like theirs, had already taken place around the world, with less than spectacular results.
If the big rollout for Visa Cash at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996 was a damp squib, the results of a major electronic purse trial on New York's affluent West Side in 1997-98 had been a greater disappointment. Almost 100,000 west-siders were invited to load up stored-value cards worth up to $500 designed for a couple of days' worth of ordinary purchases in a neighbourhood whose plentiful supply of upmarket delis, drugstores, bookstores, bagel bakeries and news stands was thought to be ideal for the experiment.
Like the Ennis people with their more modest £50 cards, however, few New Yorkers who loaded a cash card bothered to reload once it ran out. A third of merchants soon dropped out. Similar lack of enthusiasm among consumers and merchants has been reported in other electronic purse trial locations such as Celebration, Florida; Sherwood in Canada; and Swindon and Leeds in the UK. Electronic purse trials have reportedly done better in closed environments such as universities.
Trial participants were typically enticed with a vision of convenience and ease. Consumers were told it would be great not to have to carry around cash or fumble for exact change. Retailers heard that with less cash on their premises they'd save on security costs, and that shop queues would be reduced.
In fact, many retailers didn't like having an extra piece of machinery to deal with on the counter. It was handier to stick with cash. "The queues were worse at busy times with the cash cards," said one Ennis retailer. In crowded pubs, cash cards fared even worse.
Consumers said that loading and reloading cards seemed a hassle. That the electronic purse was unusable anywhere outside Ennis didn't help. "I spent too much money with it," said Ennis teenager Oliver Spellissy. The cards have done slightly better in places without human attendants, like car parks.
That seems to demonstrate the central problem with electronic purses. People like using cash. It feels "real". For instant value exchange it's hard to beat. The trouble with the cash-less society has been that it's been all push - by the promoters - and no pull from consumers.
As one sceptical American put it: "When was the last time you griped about having a wad of cash in your wallet? Chances are, never."
The real clue to the less than enthusiastic uptake for the electronic purse may lie in the idea's surprising origins. The brave new world vision sold to consumers actually began with a bank that decided, in 1990, that handling cash was a huge expense it would rather do without.
"NatWest's audacious solution was to turn cash into a product. Declaring that cash wants to be digital, NatWest created Mondex, to develop an e-cash smart card designed to be as attractive as cash," said American business writer Jonathan Burke in 1997.
Now, after years of expensive trials, costly marketing and unenthusiastic consumers, Mondex appears to be pausing for thought. Lately the company has instead been talking up the potential for card-enabled small-value transactions over the Internet.
Belief in the electronic purse is still strong in some quarters. Visa is continuing with large-scale trials, notably in Spain. Millions of cards are in circulation around the globe. Some analysts believe that stored value cash cards will be popular once they achieve multi-functionality - when a card would have lots of uses instead of just one - and inter-operability across borders. Recently agreed standards will speed up inter-operability, but whether that will be enough to win over consumers is still an open question.
Meanwhile, in Ennis, where the Visa Cash machines have migrated from counters to gather dust in drawers, or have been quietly taken away from all but a few shops and car-parks, the experiment has become an amusing memory.
The town remains a technological and social laboratory in other ways, with results as yet to be assessed or reported. At least one prediction - that half Ennis' 800 businesses will be trading electronically by mid-2000 - seems optimistic. A variety of promotions are being offered to encourage more businesses to follow the lead of firms like Mannion's Travel Agency, which offers customers full on-line services.
What is certainly profoundly different are the sheer numbers of computers, and the volume of basic computer use. The 92 per cent computer penetration in Ennis, thanks to knock-down prices, compares with 50 per cent in the US, 23 per cent in Europe and 20 per cent in Ireland as a whole.
Marginalised groups such as Travellers, and the visually impaired are on board. Children in particular are enthusiastic users, with the peculiar result that the information age project has turned the generation gap on its head as youngsters initiate adults into the ways of the new techno-world.
Ennis, perhaps, has quite enough change to be going along with. The electronic purse can wait - but don't bet too many pound coins on how long.
"In theory, this entire system is a thing of beauty," enthuses Art Becker. "Unfortunately", a more sceptical analyst cautions, "theory and practice can differ".
Sandy Barron can be contacted at sbarron@iol.ie