It’s a literal pain in the butt, the wallet.  Necessary to modern life, because it hauls around who we are, how much we have and what the government has licensed us to do. When it’s all packed into a wallet, our cash and cards can add up to an inch or more of pure pain.  More importantly to motorcyclists, when parked in a back pocket of our pants, the damned thing can all too easily just slip out silently and disappear onto the road. Hence, that signature behavior common to all street riders of the male persuasion who persist in not parking their wallets in their jackets or shirts: checking the rear pocket to make sure the wallet is still on board.

So long as we have to haul our drivers’ licenses, cash and credit cards around with us, the challenge becomes finding ways to minimize the problems presented by the wallet. Some riders—cruiser types and especially H-D cruiser types—solve the theft-and-fallout problem of the wallet with the “biker’s wallet,” secured by a chain to the belt. Some people split up the cash and cards and put the money in one front pocket and the cards in another, secured by a rubber band, a box clip, a card case or some other means. Others move into specialty wallets designed for a particular garment—the inner breast pocket of a suit coat or sport coat, say, or a waist bag’s purpose-built cards-’n’-cash section.

However it’s solved, the wallet problem is with us as long as we need to carry cash and cards. Although some people think the wallet will be “obsolete in four years,” I remain skeptical. Wallets and the pockets they now fit into (or slip out of or are stolen from) have been around for centuries and show no signs of being “obsolete.”  

I’ve tried every way I could imagine to keep cards and cash on my person, never more carefully than when I lived and worked in New York City in the late 1970s. It was common practice to carry only the stuff with you that you could most easily afford to have stolen by some mugger, so there were days when I’d walk the two blocks to my office at One Park Avenue without my driver’s license—ironic given that I was an executive editor of Car and Driver then, but since the cars we had in our test fleet were kept at the Red Ball Garage a few blocks away, I could easily stop by my apartment on the way to the garage to get kitted-up for the highway.

A wallet, like a pocket, is a piece of technology, though we usually don’t think of it that way. This is why it’s no leap at all to such solutions to the cash-and-cards problem as the RFID-blocking wallets and “identity safes” fabricated from some version of a thin-walled Faraday cage.

Even without an RFID-blocking system, though, the wallet is available to us in many guises, from the old-school pain-in-the-butt models to ones like those made by the innovative All-Ett company. These patented ultra-slim designs appeal to me, and they also appealed to Andy Goldfine, head of Aerostich RiderWearhouse. Not long ago, Andy and I talked about our mutual dislike of wallets, but Andy thought I should see how good the All-Ett “Executive”—his best-selling All-Ett—was, and sent me one to evaluate.

The theory behind this wallet is that by minimizing the thickness of the wallet’s card-retaining pockets, and by placing the pockets in a particular (patented) way, the wallet could swallow the amount of cash and cards as that pain-in-the-butt model we all too commonly put up with, without anywhere near the same thickness. Sure enough, when I tried it with the Executive that Andy sent me, it was indeed much thinner. But to offset this plus, I instantly saw a minus: The Executive is larger in length and width (not thickness) than my old bi-fold wallet, or one of my tri-folds. It’s not as long as the inside-pocket wallet my mother-in-law gave me back in the early ’80s when I was being a corporado wearing a suit every day to work, but tall enough to cause me concern in wearing it in a front pocket. Goldfine assured me that I’d see how the design allows the wallet to bend naturally to fit the contours of the trousers when sitting, and once again, he was right.

This wallet does also apparently suffer chafing wear or other stresses on the stitching, as comments made on the Aerostich product page (and on other websites) make clear. So, expecting this thing to be a lifetime solution to keeping your identity, cash, cards and receipts is obviously not to be expected.

Years ago, it occurred to me that maybe the much-maligned waist bag (or belly/fanny/hip-pack) might be the closest to a “lifetime” solution, but to date, the fashion Nazis have marginalized those packs as wear fit only for Wal-Mart weirdos (their view, not mine). So the truth is, of course, that no wallet can be the ultimate solution, not merely because of how different are the needs of individuals, but also because we’re still using technology in the form of fashion that was established in the 19th century. The iPhreaks seem to believe that the Gospel According to Jobs means that we’ll all soon be able to “carry” our cards and drivers’ licenses in our iPhones or iPods. For them, the All-Ett Executive wallet (or any wallet, for that matter) is already obsolete.

For me, though, the Executive is as good as it gets, so far. Still, every time I buck the fashion dictates and wear my Vanson black leather “waist bag,” with all my important gear stowed right where I can see it, feel it and grab it when needed, one thought keeps running through my mind: Maybe the Highland Scots were on to something with that sporran.

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