実践ビジネス英語 ディクテーション (7/12,13)

NHKラジオ「実践ビジネス英語」”Talk the Talk”のディクテーションです。

Lesson 7のテーマは、’Toward a Cashless Society’（キャッシュレス社会へ）でした。Vignetteでは、 キャッシュレス化が進むアメリカやスウェーデンの様子やキャッシュレス化の利点と課題などが話題になりました。

Talk the Talkでは、杉田先生がアメリカでのキャッシュレス決済体験と日本のキャッシュ信仰について話されています。Heatherさんのキャッシュレスへのピッチも。

Toward a Cashless Society

（S: 杉田敏先生　H: Heather Howardさん）

S: In our current vignette, the A&A staff talk about how America is moving toward a so-called ‘cashless society’, people using credit cards or smartphones to pay for just a slice of pizza, for example.

Greater efficiency is one reason for the trend.

Staffers spend less time counting coins and bills.

H: And customers spend less time on that, too.

It may not seem like much but it could really add up over the course of the day, couldn’t it?

Let’s say fifteen seconds get saved per customer when coins and bills are taken out of a transaction.

Fifteen times just four customers would be a minute.

So if you served 240 customers cashlessly, you’d save an hour.

That would be a big deal to a busy retail operation or eatery.

And customers’ satisfaction would certainly go up.

I’ve worked in retail and the food business and I know firsthand that how impatient customers can get.

Everybody’s busy.

Everybody’s got a dozen things they need to get done yesterday.

And they just wanna get their food, get their jeans and get on with the rest of their day.

S: The vignette also talks about less fear of robbery and accounting errors.

H: That takes me back to my ice cream job when I was in high school.

There was never a robbery at that store, but sometimes I would be entrusted with counting up the day’s take and then going to the bank to make a night-time deposit.

That always made me nervous walking down the street with a big bag of cash in my purse and the deposit slip.

You often go to America, Mr. Sugita.

What’s been your experience with cashless purchases?

S: Well, it’s true the United States is well ahead of Japan in the move toward a cashless society.

I can travel in America using plastic most of the time, so I’ve often come back to Japan with a wad of unused greenbacks in recent years.

Tipping may be a problem with porters and valets, but you can usually leave a digital tip in coffee shops and with taxi drivers.

When I first went to the United States in the early 1970s and shopped at a retail store with a $100 bill, I had my picture taken.

Of course, the retailer asked for my permission beforehand but I felt a bit uneasy. I realized that the merchants trusted traveler’s checks more than cash.

H: Ah, traveler’s checks.

They’ve gone the way of the dodo, haven’t they?

I remember being shocked when I first came here at how much cash Japanese people tend to carry around with them.

Far more than Americans do.

S: Cash is still king in Japan, as Ueda Shota says.

One reason is that cash―especially crisp paper money―is prized.

That’s what you pit in ceremonial envelopes as otoshidama for kids at New Year’s.

The money inside must be sharp and crisp, not crumpled.

The same goes for monetary gifts at wedding ceremonies.

If you only have old bills in your wallet, you go to a bank to get new ones.

And unlike certain countries around the world, Japanese paper money is quite clean.

H: I’ve seen bills in the States that were absolutely filthy―I mean so dirty that I was amazed stores and restaurants would take them.

But here in Japan I’ve never seen bills like that. Not once.

お疲れさまでした。

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