Chèques

The cheque is still a pretty common method of payment in France, unlike in Canada. In Canada the only things that we use cheques for are rent, paychecks (though direct deposits are becoming a lot more common), school trips and monetary gifts (birthdays, graduation, etc.). I rarely ever use my checkbook or see anyone paying for any commercial good with a cheque. I don't think you're really allowed to pay for much with cheques these days in Canada anyways. In Paris it's a different story, you can pay for your groceries, restaurant bill and many other thing with cheques. I've seen many a sign in stores reading something like "you must have 2 pieces of ID to pay by cheque." Usually the larger the amount of money, the more pieces of ID you have to show. I really started to notice the prominence of cheques here on my first day of class. It was my first business class in French and the teacher brought out the box of shiny new textbooks ready to be purchased. So the French kids started lining up to pay for a book and 80% of them had a checkbook in hand and began scribbling out the amount. I became a bit nervous thinking that maybe the teacher only accepted cheques as payment, but then I saw some students with cash in hand and breathed a sigh of relief. I never ended up getting a French bank account since I'm only here for a few months, so I can't exactly pay for anything with a cheque :)