Marc Steinberg (Concordia University)

The Incentives of PayPay versus the Convenience of Cash: On Convenience, Retail, and Cashless Payments in Japan

App-mediated payments are a large part of the experience of the financialization of everyday life – and finance in everyday life. This talk will consider the role “convenience” plays as a lure and a justification for the shift, in Japan, from the convenience of cash to the supposed (and oft-illusory) convenience of app-based payments. I’ll focus on the 2018-2019 “cashless payment wars” period, wherein the government incentivized users and retailers to shift to app-based payments, and the role of convenience stores as prime facilitators of this shift. The perceived convenience of the retail forms – convenience stores – inflected the experience of the apps themselves. In conclusion I will suggest that the application of convenience to any given experience tends to invoke a retrospective temporality, occurring (only) where a mode of action has achieved the status of a systematic default. The payment apps became the convenient mode of payment only when they became the default mode of payment.