My mother kept writing paper checks all the way into 2012. When I worked the local grocery store, she was one of the only people left who made us use the check printer machine.

She's just very conservative with money and relied on inertia to maintain a balanced budget and was averse to change that may cause her to mismanage money, as we were very poor.

Check writing lasted far too long here in the US, for whatever reason, but was somewhat killed in the early 2000s when dramatic increases in gas prices led to gas stations no longer accepting checks as they got so many bounced ones.

The benefits of writing a check: 100% offline. If someone is willing to accept a check from you, there's zero interaction with a third party at transaction time.

Checks take longer to process, so you can take advantage of that by spending money today that you will not have until tomorrow, with zero interest. This also allowed a kind of fraud called "Kiting" where you keep cycling bad checks to artificially increase some balances temporarily, but that was less possible by the 80s I think, as even then forms of electronic settlement existed.

They feel meaningful. It's effort to put together and requires effort to manage your account so you treat it as a bigger event, reducing impulse to spend. Credit card companies sold merchants on the ability to induce more spending, and Debit cards have the exact same feature.

You can give someone a blank check to spend for something without having to do any work with third parties "authorizing" their spend. Good for parents or small businesses, and quite dangerous.

Checks are sociologically neat. Literally just a piece of paper, but they keep up the bargain often enough that we were able to use writing on paper as an entire financial system. They also required an amount of trust and familiarity between transacting parties that isn't really normal anymore. The guy in charge of the local grocery store is some overpaid desk jockey with an MBA tweaking excel spreadsheets of spend and revenue until the graph goes up and to the right enough. 40 years ago that guy was my dad and he knew everyone in the town by name.

I have written a check three times in my life. Setting up a way to accept a debit card is way more difficult than just cashing a piece of paper once a month, so landlords are a big consumer of real checks nowadays.