Google Wallet is supposed to be the Earth-shattering thing that completely changes forever how we deal with money. And to be fair, it might, but as Matt Buchanan reports, it’s not. Not because the product doesn’t work well, but because the thing that sucks about money isn’t the swiping of your credit card:

But then I still had to tell the dumb credit console whether I was paying debit or credit. And then I had to wait for my receipt to print out, all ten miles of it. Which made my attempt at being a mysterious stranger with mysterious magical technology quickly disappearing into the night fail miserably since it wouldve been mad awkward to stare directly into each others eyes for 45 seconds without saying a word.

Google Wallet is clearly a close-up glimpse at what the seamless, slippery future of money looks like—MasterCard is an appropriate enough vector for a technological Mark of the Beast, I suppose—but its still very much in 2011. Friction abounds.

About the author: David Pierce (1175 Posts)

David Pierce, the founder of Digitizd, is now Reviews Editor at The Verge.