Why do Americans always use checks?

Now more and more people choose to go abroad, and the United States seems to be a good choice. However, people who have lived in China for decades are unfamiliar with foreign countries and are not fully prepared for how to let banks serve them. In China, the relationship between many people and banks only stays in the aspect of storage, and people often go to banks only to save money or withdraw money. But in the United States, more than 90% of receipts and payments and transactions are done by checks instead of banknotes. After experiencing the stage of using shells, precious metals and paper money as currency, mankind has already ushered in the era of using checks or credit cards as currency. Every corner of American life is full of checks, so it is certainly impossible for people to ignore the demand for banks.

A large part of China people who have just arrived in the United States are not rich, so it is unlikely that they will become big customers of banks. As many as 58,000 banks in the United States are competing at the same time (the latest data: the number of banks and their branches in the United States has increased to 70,000), and they will not give up any potential customers. Therefore, the salesman with a keen sense of smell in the bank may come to visit soon after he arrives, with the purpose of pulling business. I have to admit that fierce competition determines the quality of service. The larger banks in the United States have special international departments, where there are salesmen who are proficient in different languages. When you hear the local accent of the salesman, your guard will be reduced by more than half, and then you will be moved by his enthusiasm and responsible spirit, and you will not pay enough attention to the ambiguity of the terms when you are moved, so you choose this bank. But please rest assured that credit is the life of a bank, and it is unlikely that your money will be cheated. In addition, once you are not satisfied, you can immediately change to another bank.

The bank opens an account for you free of charge. You have a bank account number. From now on, all your income and remittances from other places will go directly into your account. At the same time, it is necessary for you to spend money to print several checkbooks, because a large part of your expenses, including rent, utilities and so on, will be paid by cheque in the future. Fill in a check when necessary, write down the payee's name (or unit), sign it and send it to the payee. The payee signs the back of the check and gives it to the bank that serves him, and the money you pay will be transferred to the payee's account through the inter-bank bill exchange. At the end of the month, the bank will send you all the checks you wrote within one month, so that you will know whether the checks and money you wrote have arrived, and the checks also play the role of receipts. If you pay by check, every expenditure or income account will be recorded, so illegal transactions can only be made in cash. For example, illegal employment of immigrants, wages below the legal minimum standards, and so on. In the United States, the drug trade volume is huge, so it is very unwise to choose cash, so sometimes gold is used for trading.

The check usage rate in America is so high that it permeates every detail of life. What's the difference between paying by check and paying in cash? Americans trust checks mainly because they have advantages over cash.

First of all, as long as there is money in the account, you can pay by check. If you pay in cash, if the bank is short of cash, even if you have deposits, you can't withdraw cash, which will delay time and hinder your work. Some people object to ordinary people withdrawing cash, and banks are basically not short of cash. However, some domestic banks have had to wait for a period of time for remittance because of insufficient cash, and the use of checks has avoided this trouble, and the time for writing checks is much shorter than counting money. For Americans with a strong sense of time, the convenience and quickness of checks is one of the reasons why Americans prefer checks.

Secondly, a check or cash is proof of your ability to pay. As we all know, a check is valid only if it is signed. This is private, and your money can only be at your disposal. On the other hand, money belongs to those who take it out of their pockets. Whatever the reason, whatever the way, as long as your money goes into someone else's pocket, it becomes someone else's. This is the reason for the theft of banknotes and other incidents. Stealing checks is rare, because checks must be signed by the owner to be valid, and it is useless to have no difference between unsigned checks and white paper.

Third, we know that funds can also generate value in their operations, so money deposited in banks will earn interest. When you use cash, of course, if the money stays in your pocket, you won't get interest.

You use a check to transfer money from one account to another. Even for a second, the bank has to pay interest, so the interest paid in cash is higher. In addition, the use of checks saves the trouble of counting banknotes, avoids the loss of banknotes in circulation, and saves the time and energy of going to the payment office in person. Moreover, the cost loss of mailing and cashing checks is far less than the cost of cash payment. Compared with the use of cash, a large number of checks can greatly save the manpower and material resources consumed in the transaction.

When I first started using checks, people often worried that checks would be cheated. For example, when mailing a check, the check is lost or impersonated; The payee received a bad check. Don't worry, this question will gradually disappear in the process of using checks. In fact, all credit transactions have to face such problems, and so do cash transactions. A person from primitive society, who bought a batch of things with a piece of paper, is bound to be surprised, and even suspect that one party will breach the contract when paying the money first and delivering it first, just as the payee insists that the money has not been received, or the payer insists that the payment has been made. But in fact, although there is intentional breach of contract, the incidence of petty theft is much smaller, which shows that credit relationship has become a system observed by the whole society and even a natural behavior habit. But once this credit relationship is destroyed, it will be disastrous for society. The fragility of credit is inextricably linked with the fuzziness of ownership.

Unlike the situation that the triangular debt of state-owned enterprises is mostly solved by the government printing money, there is no triangular debt problem in private debt.

In order to avoid the restriction problem, the United States has established a system to prevent possible check fraud. For example, to buy something by check, the check holder needs to show his photo ID card or car driver's license to prove it. Once it is found that someone is using a check improperly, the bank will immediately record the facts. In the future, not only will there be no bank to provide services for him, but even it will be difficult for him to find a job and buy a house, and he will lose the minimum conditions for his foothold in society.

Although American society is free, it also has strict forbidden zones. If you cross the line, you will be sad for the rest of your life. The files of banks and insurance companies are very powerful. These files are transparent materials that I can know at any time. If I find that the content is untrue, I can correct it through certain procedures. It is not a big mistake to miscalculate the accounts, and the violation clause is not too harsh. Writing a bad check, that is, the amount due is greater than the deposit amount, is not a serious violation of discipline, and a fine of more than ten yuan is enough. However, it is a big mistake to forge a signature to take someone else's money or report the loss by check.

On the other hand, checks can't completely replace cash. There are always some fragmentary expenses in life, just like buying a ticket on a bus, and it is extremely inconvenient to use a check, so it is inevitable that cash will always be withdrawn from the bank. At the same time, in order to be safe and avoid interest loss, it is inconvenient to carry a lot of cash, so you will have to go to the bank often to withdraw money. Therefore, in order to facilitate depositors to withdraw money and reduce the cost of hiring a large number of employees, electronic automatic banking came into being about 20 years ago. Its basic function is to deposit and withdraw money and inquire about transaction records. After opening an account in a bank, you will get a bank card for which only you know the password. Insert the bank card into the e-bank, and enter the password. When the machine confirms that the two match through the network, you can withdraw an integer cash of no more than 500 dollars (or a certain amount) from the e-bank every day. Of course, you can also deposit the received checks and cash into the bank. After the operation, e-banking will print out a detailed list. There are many electronic banks not only in banks, but also in big supermarkets and downtown streets. No one needs to be on duty to manage them, so it is very convenient to use. In order to strictly manage and prevent monopoly, American law stipulates that banks are not allowed to set up branches across States. But e-banking can be set up across States. At present, there are several sets of networking machines used by all banks in the United States. Even if you travel in other states, you can still withdraw cash from your own bank, and a handling fee of only one or two dollars equivalent to the remittance fee will be automatically deducted from your account. Due to the emergence of electronic banking, it is more convenient to withdraw cash, so cash transactions have replaced some original transactions with checks.

However, if Americans want to travel outside the United States, e-banking will not work well, and traveler's checks will show its advantages at this time. When you go to the bank to buy a traveler's check with a face value of 20 to 1000 dollars, you only need to pay a handling fee of 1%. There are two blank lines on the signed check. When you buy traveler's checks from the bank, you need to sign on a blank line, and then sign on another blank line in front of the cashier when you pay with it. The payee confirms that their signatures are consistent, and the check has the same effect as cash. In case traveler's checks are lost, people who want to use them falsely may not dare to forge their signatures in front of the cashier. In addition, the inspection can be reported by telephone. If someone forges a signature and fraudulently uses a check that has been reported lost, the bank will compensate for the loss.

In view of the convenience that checks bring to American life, the cost savings for Americans and the promotion of interpersonal transactions, checks have always been a particularly popular payment method in the United States.