Last week I wrote a column about “Generation P.” The P is for plastic. The jist is that young people tend to use credit or debit more than cash, even for purchases less than $2.

While researching the story, I also learned that older people are less comfortable buying a pop with plastic. I’ll say I was in that camp until a year or so ago when I started noticing that many places don’t require signing for such small payments.

The column didn’t get into check writing. I used to write checks for small purchases, but check-writing is time consuming and harder to track in Quicken. According to Visa, it takes 75.2 seconds for a check transaction versus 26.1 seconds for a signature-based debit card.

With the time you waste behind a someone writing out a check, here’s what Visa says you could do:

49 seconds/day

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 1:47 pm and is filed under cash, credit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.