Wednesday, two days from today, marks three-and-a-half years since the declaration of the national emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic on March 13, 2020.

Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been from this blog's first COVID-adjacent post on March 30, 2020. Sadly, many of us have lost family and friends. We've changed in ways large and small: work and study habits, practices for disease prevention, our willingness to dine outdoors in all kinds of weather. The ways we pay, like many daily habits, reflect broader changes in our society. Using data from the 2019 and 2022 Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, here are some notable differences in 2022:

  • We consumers are more likely to shop remotely. Nineteen percent of purchases were made remotely in 2022, more than double the 9 percent made remotely in 2019.
  • We're layering more and more ways to pay on top of existing methods. Two-thirds of us have online payment accounts like PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App, compared to just a bit over half in 2019.
  • We pay with our phones. Six in 10 consumers made at least one mobile or tablet payment in 2022, compared to 4 in 10 in 2019.
  • We are more likely to pay with cards. We made 63 percent of payment with cards in 2022, compared to 56 percent in 2019.
  • We drifted away from cash to pay. We made 17 percent of payments with cash in 2022, down from 26 percent in 2019.
  • We keep more cash on hand for weather or other emergencies or for saving. Consumers average $418 stored elsewhere in 2022, compared to $241 in 2019. This practice is partially reflected in currency in circulation, which increased from $1.77 trillion in October 2019 to $2.28 trillion in October 2022.
  • We are more likely to experiment with crypto. Almost 10 percent of consumers owned crypto assets (bitcoin, for example) in 2022, compared to 1.7 percent in 2019.

Back in 2020, I blogged about my friend's difficulty in trying to use contactless pay. It's hard to imagine such a scenario today. Not only we consumers but also our digital ecosystem of financial institutions, payments services providers, buyers, and sellers have been on a long, strange trip.

Photo of Claire Greene
By Claire Greene, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed