Spare some change? Helping the poor in a cashless society
Aug 27, 2018
4 minutes
“Sorry. I don’t have cash,” is one of the most common phrases panhandlers hear from passersby, if they hear anything at all.
And it’s becoming truer each year: In 2016, Gallup found that just 24 percent of respondents made “all” or “most” of their purchases with cash, down from 36 percent who said they did so five years earlier. The polling company attributes this trend to the rise in digital payments and mobile credit card readers.
“It’s a real problem for us,” says Michael Shorey, a former panhandler who now sells Spare Change News, a Boston-area biweekly street newspaper, across the street from Harvard Yard in
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