A few weeks ago, Pavan landed in Vegas without his debit card.
I’ll tap, he said, holding up his phone.
At times, Vegas feels like a time capsule of the mid-00s. My local convenience store has a DVD rental box out the front. At the bank, people queue up with physical cheques to cash. When I did my taxes earlier this year, I printed my forms and mailed them to the IRS.
You’re going to need a card here, I told Pavan. We tried anyway: the first place didn’t take tap payments. No Apple Pay™ here. Neither did the second.
This is stupid, said Pavan. Vegas is a tourist city. Don’t they want my money?
Now that I’ve thought of Vegas as a 2000s-throwback, I see it everywhere. Plastic chandeliers. Faux-wood lino. Even the palm trees feel nostalgic: jagged saw palms, not lush ferns. Outside of the strip, every building in Vegas is made from the same beige, rendered brick. The streets are wide, the buildings large and square. Every second car is a monster-truck-cum-pick-up. It reminds me of driving through Nunawading, only with billboards for divorce attorneys and rapid loans, rather than Toyta dealerships and furniture stores. Some out-of-town writers and I went to the Vegas Test Kitchen, a downtown restaurant that features new concepts from visiting chefs. They pour our water into mason jars with handles. This place is trendy: it’s more 2015 than 2008.
We look into ways to get Pavan’s money, but they’re all too high-tech for Vegas. There’s no cardless cash-out. There are no phone payments. My bank has recently adopted a third-party payment system called Zelle™, which allows users to send and receive money instantly, but it only works if both parties have it. If only he’d carried a chequebook.
Pavan still has access to PayPal, though. He uses it to buy things on Amazon which can be delivered within a few hours. Vegas is not stuck in the 00s after all. The future is now.