Gosh, prices are going to go up again as wholesalers add in the cost of electronic payment rather than continue to receive checks they have to jump through hurdles to collect on.
Checks are mostly used by older consumers for payment of monthly bills and by businesses to pay for wholesale purchases.
Most checks are run as debits these days by most retailers. Those who don't have the tech, and don't want to deal with check fraud simply don't take them.
Walmart runs your check, but you get to keep it as your record. The system treats it like a debit card transaction.
Hell, when I worked for Autozone way back in the early 1990s, they had a check scanner that would red-flag checks where the account didn't have enough to cover the check amount. Run it through the machine, and if it's okay, accept the check for payment. Granted, it wasn't as quick as a debit card, and if they ran the account too low by the time the check actually cleared, it would be returned, but it cut out a lot of fraud up front.
True story.
The former Pastor of my church (who retired two years ago) set up an Online Donation fund and began encouraging parishoners to begin making their weekly donations online.
Part of his thinking was that this would reduce the expense of having to mail out envelopes and process checks for deposit. It would also bring in a few more dollars perhaps from those who don’t attend church regularly.
After an audit from the Diocese the new pastor has announced that they are dropping the Online Donation plan and are asking everyone to go back to writing physical checks and putting them in the collection basket on Sunday.
The reason? The bank that was processing all of the online donations was charging a 5% fee.....$50 on every $1000 donated. You can print and mail a lotta envelopes for that!