A year ago, buying a Starbucks coffee didn’t feel “real” to Samantha Thomas. “It was just tapping,” the 41-year-old private tutor from Wigan says. “It didn’t feel like real money, it was just my card.” Nowadays, Thomas pulls out a £5 note every time she wants a hot drink. “When you’re physically handing over solid money,” she says, “it just makes you think twice.”
For the last 12 months, Thomas has been a cash-only consumer. She leaves her debit card at home when she does her weekly food shop, bringing only the budget she has allocated in notes. As a result, Thomas could “sit here and tell you to the penny” what most items in the supermarket cost. “I know that if I go to Aldi something would cost me 6p less than if I went to Asda and about 5p less than if I went to Tesco,” she says. Thomas’s “solid money” habit hasn’t just changed her attitude to Starbucks; it’s changed the way she spends and saves entirely.
