US Postal Service money orders can be purchased with cash and used the same way as a certified check. This works for utility payments. Mobile phone companies take cash as payments, in both their dedicated retail stores and a large network of affiliated airtime merchants. In some countries, there's a mini-economy for the trade of airtime minutes within cellphone networks, based on physical stores that can convert cash->minutes. M-Pesa was one of the earlier success stories, unifying payments and digital identity, but it was anchored in real-world ingress points for cash.
Also as noted in the article, things like electricity, internet and other utility cannot be paid in cash either here.
In the United States you can.
Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses. ("Currency exchanges" in Chicago, or whatever your local equivalent is.)
Also, every utility company I've had serving my last five apartments has had a public lobby where people can make cash payments. I suspect even cell phone bills can be paid with cash at a cell phone company's retail store.
> Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses.
So long as you are on a post-paid account you don't even need this. If you are on a post-paid plan of any sort, it's a debt. You have the legal right (via the Coinage Act) to pay that debt via cash regardless of any systems they might not have setup to do so.
It's a fun game to play sometimes to remind institutions of this fact, and usually rouses some bored corporate counsel from their slumber to first argue with you, then apologize.
Probably doesn't really help build a great business relationship, however.
