Paying for doughnuts with a phone

At a doughnut shop today, I noticed the people at the head of each line were using their phones, either to pay for an order or to use a coupon. I thought how ridiculous it would sound if I were to go back twenty or thirty years and tell my mother about this.

Me: Some day people are going to pay for doughnuts with a phone.

Mom: You mean like calling up a doughnut shop to place an order? We already do that.

Me: No, they’re going to take their phone into the doughnut shop and pay with it.

Mom: Good grief. Why not just use cash?

Me: Well, they could. But it’ll be easy to use their phones since most people will carry them around all the time anyway.

Mom: People will carry around phones?!

Me: Sorta. More like computers, that can also make phone calls.

Mom: People will carry around computers?!!

old PC

Me: Not really. I was just making that up. But they will drive flying cars.

Mom: OK, I could see that. That’ll be nice.

One thought on “Paying for doughnuts with a phone

  1. Anthony DeRobertis

    Twenty years ago was 1996. Cell phones were not unheard of. Laptops were common enough too. The PalmPilot would be released a year later. Same with SpeedPass (Exon and Mobile’s RFID payment system).

    30 years ago, though, they existed, but I’m not sure if people had heard of them.

    40 years ago, that would be quite the story. But I’m not sure that’s unique to our time. I mean, compare 1940 to 1900, with that whole electricity thing. Airplanes too.

Comments are closed.