> From what I heard the cut the public funding for Digitalization by 90% last year.

This is basically wrong. They moved the budgets to different departments, where it made more sense. And it actually does move on..slowly. It's basically a living example of too many technical debts and the pains of federalism gone wrong.

> Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!

Real credit cards are very uncommon in Germany. Debit cards on the other hand are working well everywhere, even in small shops (since the pandemia to be fair).

> Debit cards on the other hand are working well everywhere

Not yet. There still exist plenty of cash-only places. In my neighborhood (P-Berg, Berlin) both nearest restaurant and nearest coffee shop are cash-only.

> Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!

Not sure where you people live, but this myth has to stop, eventually. I can literally count on one hand the n. of shops NOT accepting cards - it's most of the times shops which, I guess, use cash to have flexibility in their accountings :)

“Accepting cards” is not the same as “accepting credit cards” though… A lot of them only accept girocards and not credit cards…

And credit cards in Germany are not "credit" cards as well. At least the one I got from Sparkasse does not let you hold a balance and must be paid in full every month.

Not sure about those, but I got mine around 2-3 years ago from gebührenfrei.de, which is from Advanzia Bank. Seems fine so far…with a minor disclaimer that I don’t really use it much. :-)

I don't have enough experience to speak about CC in Germany, but I don't see why a Rewe or ... boh, Aldi, Mcdonalds, etc should prevent that. I am a bit surprised, to be honest.

Because there's a significant a transaction fee if you're paying by credit card, with cash or debit card there's no transaction fee.

The bigger mystery is why stores in some other countries are happy to have a payment method chosen by the customer eat into their profit.

Big chains and enterprises, for sure. But there’s still a lot of SMBs not accepting credit cards.

Are these the same SMBs that ... accept only cash? :) Or do they really exclude CCs?

They exclude CCs. They have a card reader but they either have a sign saying, or the vendor will simply say, “keine Kreditkarte”.

So a lot will have in their contract with their processor that they actually can accept Visa/Mastercard, so the sign is there to put you off.

But actually a lot don't, and when you try to pay, even contactless, with a non-Girocard, it won't work.

Visa and Mastercard don't magically let you on their network because you have a card machine.

Ämter only take girocards or cash.

Not true. It probably depends on the location, but last time I paid for a public service, I had no problem using my Visa Debit Card. I think it was not even possible to use cash.

Admittedly, this was almost a year ago. I found I could pay with credit cards in Berlin, but once I was in smaller areas I was looked at like I was insane if I tried to pay by anything other than cash. Probably didn’t help that my German was terrible.

In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.

Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.

I moved from the UK to Germany in 1996 and back then the banking & payment was just sooo backwards. Some stores were incredibly anachronistic (Lerche springs to mind - since closed down)

Sorry to hear it's still the same.

Germany and "digital" payments have a history due to old reasons.

We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.

N'ah mate, the main reason is tax fraud, not trust in data holding entities, otherwise nobody in Germany would use Google/Instagram/TikTok if they cared so much about their data privacy.

Being free to dodge the tax man is incredibly valuable for small business and individuals in Germany as a lot of wealth is built on tax fraud. That's the kind of privacy people mean.

This looks like the typical black or white view about things.

Germany has 80+ million people. Having nobody on Instagram/Tiktok would be unthinkable.

However, historically speaking, this hesitation to have privacy over "convenience" is implemented still everywhere.

You can't just minimize it with "people want to evade tax", although it's also true.

> N'ah mate, the main reason is tax fraud, not trust in data holding entities, otherwise nobody in Germany would use Google/Instagram/TikTok if they cared so much about their data privacy.

The people who are very vocal about (data) privacy in Germany (which are quite some people, though not all) indeed typically try to avoid such services.

There's a difference between "some vocal people" and "the majority of people".

And there's a difference between being vocal and actually walking the walk and doing anything about it.

> We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

Exactly.

This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 35 years ago (many of its crimes still have not been prosecuted). There still exist lots of contemporary witnesses who can tell you what being potentially be surveilled means in the day-to-day life.

I heard of people being sent ... far away ... just because of jealous neighbors spying on you.

That's some level of f** up.

No wonder that cash is the only accepted payment method in a world that tries at all costs to sneak into your private stuff.

> I think calling the 15 years of CDU government under Helmut Kohl

I fixed my mistake. :-)

Didn't Germany have 3 dictatorships in the 20th century?

East Germany (ended in 1990), Third Reich (ended in 1945), German Monarchy (ended in 1918)

I'm not used to people calling monarchies dictatorships, even though they are in some ways similar. Until 1918, many states in Europe were monarchies.

Calling Saudi Arabia a dictatorship is unfamiliar to you?

Yes. And in any case, that wasn't the point. I haven't seen anybody refer to pre-WWI European monarchies as "dictatorships".

Right. Funny way to point out treaty of Darin as a breaking point.

No idea what your point is. The German empire wasn't a dictatorship, if you want to claim otherwise, find me a credible source that says so.

Don't mix cash with digitization. Japan is even more cash.bases than Germany, yet I'd say more advanced in terms of digitization.

Aren't they still faxing documents all over the place? (AFAIK, you might have to do that from time to time in Germany as well)

They are, and they still rely on hankos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag...). There has been a recent push for "digital transformation", but it is still in the early stages.

True all.

At the same time, they had an early form of mobile Internet since they year 2000 (when most of the West didn't have internet at all, let alone mobile internet): https://www.wired.com/2000/06/its-a-wireless-world-in-japan/

Japan is ranked 4th/20th vs Germany's 23th/35th for mobile/fixed internet speed, so much better overall (and anecdotal evidence is that internet in Germany's countryside is rock bottom).

So Japan rather seems to me to _want_ to do their own thing (at least when it comes to preference for cash, although I agree that still faxing things is strange), compared to Germany which _cannot_, for various reasons.

This one [0]? Legend, flipping through the records there was a dream come true for some years. But Vinyl shops world-wide had to close, but only this.

[0] https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.stuttgart-album-zu...