Segues: An Empty Wallet Is A Full Wallet?

Each Segues  column starts with something tech-related before quickly branching out from there into a tangentially related thread. These articles are born from my thought and speech patterns that regularly contain quickfire transitions. For one of my birthdays, a friend made me a crown that said “King of the Segues.” Actually, it said “King of the Segways” and that was the day we learned how to spell segue correctly.

On May 19, Microsoft released its latest update for the Xbox 360, and this one gives you the ability to link your PayPal account to your Xbox Live account. Now, you can buy Microsoft Points, buy games, or rent from their Zune application with funds from your PayPal account. Your Xbox Live purchases were already done digitally, but now you can make all of those purchases through the same centralized source you use to buy items on eBay or send money to friends for your half of dinner. Some Xbox owners, and video game news sources, may see this as “probably the least anticipated Xbox 360 system update in the post-NXE [New Xbox Experience] era.” However, it does signal society’s further and further leap away from what has been seen as traditional ways to handle and spend money for much of the last five decades.

A peek in many people’s wallets today reveals a distinct dearth of paper money, and change only rattles in my pockets now when I need it to fill the parking meter. Even parking meters are doing away with the need of coins though as more and more become payable with a credit card. And then there are places like Akron, Ohio, where the parking meters have gone cardless too. With an app on your phone, you can now pay for your time at the meter and stay up-to-date on expiring times so you can easily add time to your session without having to trek all the way back out to the car every hour. This is all in the vein of making the world a more efficient place. Eventually, coin parking meters across the country will get replaced with either the credit card or cardless variety. When the new comes, the old gets pushed aside. Simply put, older and established forms of money are becoming obsolete.

Think of money as a type of technology. As the years have progressed, so has money. Not only has the appearance of U.S. currency changed radically since its inception, but how it’s used regularly evolves with the times. A discussion of monetary policy and the frighteningly dwindling buying power of a U.S. dollar is too complicated an issue for both this article and this writer to tackle, but think about how you use money in your every day life. How often do you write a check? Does your landlord allow you pay rent electronically (through a source such as PayPal)? Did news of the Google Wallet excite you because it meant you could carry even fewer credit/check/debit cards or paper money in your wallet? Americans have had a kung fu grip on their credit cards that they’ve slowly started to release in the last few years thanks to the ridiculous jumps in interest rates and secret fees put in place by multiple credit card companies. This tight hold on using credit cards spread to just about every part of our lives, and it took widespread fear and rage against credit card companies to get people to think about the idea of letting go.

So, while the idea of adding a PayPal account to your XBox Live account may seem like an unimportant change to the overall system, it may also be symptomatic of a larger movement to bring how we use money more in line with the future it exists in.