It's 2025 - Why Are We Still Carrying Plastic Credit Cards Like It's 1985?

Let’s be real: plastic credit cards have become the last relic of an analog age we’ve mostly left behind. Remember when we used to carry around wads of cash? That’s basically a historical reenactment at this point. Most of us haven’t used physical cash in years. A whopping 75% of adults worldwide now use some form of digital payment. Even grandmas are Venmoing each other for bingo night. So why are we still clinging to these outdated hunks of plastic?

Digital wallets are already here and thriving. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay - like a real life Jedi mind trick - they let you wave your phone and walk away. No more digging through your wallet. No more fumbling with cards that somehow always end up at the bottom of your bag, tangled in old receipts and expired gift cards. Just one tap and you're done.

And the security? Don’t even get me started. Physical cards are basically "steal me" business cards for anyone with sticky fingers. Lose it, and you're on the phone for hours, canceling it, ordering a new one, and praying nobody went on a spending spree at Best Buy in the meantime. Digital wallets, on the other hand, use encryption, tokenization, and often require your literal fingerprint or face to complete a transaction. Even if your phone gets snatched, your money stays put - locked behind a biometric fortress.

Plus, there’s the environmental angle. Plastic cards are tiny, sure, but they’re part of a much bigger environmental footprint. Billions of cards get produced, replaced, and dumped into landfills every year. Swapping them out for digital wallets doesn’t just streamline your life - it also means less plastic waste. Because, you know, the Earth would kind of like to stick around for a bit.

So let’s recap: physical cards are insecure, inconvenient, environmentally unfriendly, and basically a badge of boomer nostalgia at this point. What exactly are we holding onto here? Are we worried the phone might run out of battery? Come on - if you’re like me, your phone spends half its life surgically attached to a charger. Besides, I’d rather take that tiny risk than carry around a wallet stuffed with the financial equivalent of VHS tapes.

What’s even funnier is how normal this all feels. We’ve reached the point where pulling out a plastic card feels like pulling out a paper check. Yeah, it technically works, but it also says, “Hi, I’m stuck in a time warp.” We’re living in a world where everything else is digitized - our tickets, our boarding passes, our medical records. Your phone can even tell you if you’re walking enough steps today or if you should lay off the cheeseburgers. Yet we’re still swiping those dumb little rectangles to pay for our overpriced lattes.

You know what? Maybe this is what progress looks like. We hold onto things for a while, maybe a bit too long, until we realize they’re just… not needed anymore. We phased out floppy disks. We moved on from cassette tapes. We’re slowly (mercifully) ditching fax machines (What is it with the Government and Faxes?). Physical credit cards are next in line. And they should be.

Of course, there are a few holdouts - some small businesses and restaurants that still haven’t quite figured out contactless payments. Bless them. I’m sure they’ll catch up eventually. But for the rest of us? There’s no excuse. If your phone is already your alarm clock, your personal assistant, your camera, and your portal to every cat video in existence, why not let it be your wallet too?

It’s not just a convenience thing, either. It’s about embracing the future we’re already living in. A future where paying for a coffee doesn’t involve rummaging around like a raccoon in a trash can. A future where security means biometric verification, not crossing your fingers that the waiter doesn’t clone your card. A future where our kids might actually ask us, “Wait, you used to carry around little pieces of plastic to buy stuff? Like Pokémon cards, but boring?”

So let’s stop pretending we still need physical credit cards. Let’s put them in the same dusty drawer as our old checkbooks and never look back. My mom swiped her plastic credit card at the grocery store in the 1980s, and it felt futuristic. But it’s 2025 now, and I feel embarrassed doing the same. The world has moved on. 

It’s time for our wallets to catch up.