PART III
43
EAT, DRINK & CHIC
When in Amsterdam…
After two decades here, native New Yorker Lauren Comiteau is still working out how to ‘go Dutch’.
CASH IS KING
A
Lauren Comiteau is a journalist and writer who has been covering the Netherlands for TIME magazine, CBS Radio and others since 1996. She lives in Amsterdam with her two daughters.
fter I sold the Amsterdam house I’d raised my daughters in for over a decade, I was about to plunge all my profits into a new one. A firm believer in ‘real’ estate, I wanted to wend my way back up the ownership ladder, especially since interest rates were about to hit zero. As a freelancer, though, a mortgage is about as impossible to obtain as a parking space on a Sunday night in my beloved De Pijp neighbourhood. Still, I was ready to buy. ‘Cash is king,’ my father, a longtime Wall Street moneyman and admitted ATM-skeptic, advised me. ‘Hold on to it in this uncertain world for a bit.’ But it got me thinking: in the Netherlands, cash is not only not king, it’s more like the joker. In so many places, it has simply ceased to be recognised as legal tender. More and more stores these days, from the ubiquitous upscale almost-organic food store Marqt to my local coffee roasters and even the bagel shop, take pin – or debit – cards exclusively. ‘It’s safer for us not to have cash on hand,’ one Marqt worker told me. ‘And because we don’t have to transport it by security trucks, we are a littler greener.’ Fair enough for a store whose mission is
healthy eating, although I have seen many a tourist baffled after perusing the shelves and then being unable to purchase their goods with actual bank notes. But a major bank? All Dutch banks now charge a fee if you deposit cash more than a certain amount of times per year. At my own ING, it’s six euros per deposit after the first six. ‘Cash is expensive,’ an ING worker told me. ‘We don’t keep it at the bank and have to pay to cart it off to the central bank.’ She says the majority of people get paid by direct deposit anyway, so the policy doesn’t really affect them. (Clearly, they don’t have an alimony-paying ex in a cash business.) As for cheques, although Americans still use them, my ING guide says that at the branch level, they don’t even know what to do with them. A teller once told me that my work cheque would take six weeks to clear as it had to be sent back to the US. ‘By pony express?’ I asked. Cash may soon be going the way of the cheque. And frankly, so may the teller. Metaphorically-speaking, of course, cash will always be king; if you have the funds, you’ll be sitting pretty atop the throne. Just don’t forget to bring along your debit card.