Yes but they are not really small payments. I think that the smallest I have made is 59p but it is usually because Apple has my credit card on record. It usually means that the purchases are aggregated and I get an invoice for a number of purchases at once.

You have a local cheese shop? Awesome!

http://www.greys-cheese.co.uk/

the problem is that you can easily spend £30 quid without trying

I have formed an opinion that we must never stop using cash. Once we do, we lose control over our own money; it ceases to exist as a real entity and just becomes numbers on a screen*. It would all be done electronically, using cards or whatever, and the supply could be turned off on a whim - and then where would we be?

Only a short while ago a lady in our local supermarket had two consecutive cards refused by the checkout. If she hadn't had a third that worked, she'd have been lost. For this reason I always try to carry a reasonable amount of coins and folding money with me.

*Some would argue we don't have real money any more anyway, but at least I can still go to a bank and get real money to the value of the numbers in my account.

But notes and coins are only worth anything because the bank says they are and society believes them. If shops stopped accepting them as payment they'd soon be of no value at all.

It would be crazy only having a 2p in copper. What happens when you pay 6p in twos for something that costs 5p or whatever? You'd have to change five twos for two fives, which wouldn't work if you didn't have them.

If we ditched copper altogether, then that could work but you'd only be able to buy penny sweets five at a time...

+1 to this - ditch both 1p and 2p coins and have everything priced in 5p increments.

If you look at science fiction, in most cases, where cash has been made illegal and everything is electrionic, there is usually a blackmarket using old money (E.g. William Gibson's Neuromance trilogy used New Yen).