When I received an email containing one of the first Covid-19 payment memes—“How do you wish to pay?”, with an image of Visa, MasterCard, and a roll of toilet paper—I thought, OK, there might be some interesting payment and money things I should pay attention to during this pandemic. Students and colleagues sent me lots more toilet-paper themed memes and made jokes: about scenes of barter, the transactors trying to determine an exchange rate; toilet paper on a golden platter; stores accepting toilet paper rolls for one cup of coffee or one scoop of ice cream (“must be new; one roll per visit”). A satirical (I think!) account of a churchgoer placing a roll of toilet paper on the collection plate. One Sunday afternoon my family ordered delivery. Every order over $40 came with a free roll of toilet paper.

In between all the new kinds of work involved in transitioning a large university to fully-online operations, I filed away the toilet paper stuff in a special email folder. Toilet paper economies.

But when the University of California, Irvine Graduate Division announced that it would henceforth accept scanned forms and digital signatures (it has long been a preserve and holdout of paper) and more than that, suspend all fee payment associated with those forms—which heretofore had to be paid with paper check—I thought, game on! This pandemic is changing payment.

Read on, courtesy of Anthropology News.