More regional and small business retailers are being challenged with banking cash as banks retreat from branch and even deposit ATM service in more locations.
Talking to a newsagent yesterday, they mentioned that for them now banking cash involved and two hour round trip with no other bank or ATM nearby to manage cash deposits.
With lottery revenue being swept twice a week and other demands on cash, they are currently making four trips to the bank each week with the hope of cutting this back to three a week. They are actively considering going cashless as a result because of the six hour saving and the release of additional cash they are holding to cover when they cannot get to the bank.
If you cost up the six hours of travel time, other banking time costs of around two hours a week and fuel, you can reach between $250 and $300 a week. That is at least $500 to $600 in revenue cost.
If I was affected by this I’d be writing to my local federal and state politicians, the banking industry ombudsman, the small business commissioner as well as media outlets.
Surely they have a Post Office nearby. Depending on the bank that they are with deposits of up to $10000 can be made daily. If they don’t know about this service their local Post Office isn’t doing their job properly or they bank ANZ. Even then getting a holding account with another bank and swapping it over the net would save them heaps of time and money.
If the only issue was depositing it would be simple however the challenge is that we constantly have to buy change to service small lotto payouts. Many customers want the payout in cash and will buy their next lotto by eftpos. I can’t blame agents for thinking about going cashless.
If there is no Bank or P.O. in the Town it is indeed a very small community. If this is the case then all the merchants could get together pool resources and do a relay of Banking which could reduce the amount of times one neds to go to the Bank.
There may be a cost if one was to engage Security if the service was available.
These are the alternatives that I can see, others may see more as I see it for all retailers to go no cash could be a huge loss of trade for their business for example a lot of consumers may not want to pay by credit or debit card and want to pay cash. Then there is the Gaming where some creidt cards (Woolworths) won’t accept lotto or Gaming on their cards.
Australia Post is looking in to the coin change situation for business. Hold fire and keep in touch with your local Post Office. If they order cash in for their own needs they will probably be happy to add a bit of coin to their order even now. As Graeme said, small business needs to work in together more than ever as big business deserts us.
We do a lot of larger lotto payouts via eftpos (Tyro) so it puts the money directly into whatever account the customer chooses.
If the transaction total is a negative value (ie a payout), simply do pay by eftpos, and the Tyro machine processes it as a refund back to the customers account – with no fees.
Only our managerial staff are allowed to do these, but it means the customer can get their payout when we are low on cash. This wont solve the issue in the OP, but it may help out.