This week, an enraged QSR customer rammed their car into a suburban Nando's restaurant, as covered by Alexandra Feiam reporting for news.com.au. Thankfully no one was injured.
The stolen vehicle had "we don't accept cash here" spray painted on the side, seemingly a targeted message for the Fast Food chain that decided to go cashless in May 2024.
While the corporate rationale for cash handling has been made clear (typically stated to be that the cost of handling cash outweighs the revenue / margin gained), it's not a certainty that brands in QSR would really benefit from this.
- Fonto Market Metrics data shows that some 11.6% of all consumer expenditure tracked during the December 2024 quarter were cash withdrawals.
- Using Reserve Bank monthly retail payments data, there were approximately $90 billion of cash withdrawals From January to October 2024
- Fonto tracking also suggests that just over 3% (3.06% for the September Quarter) of all consumer expenditure goes into the QSR sector.
Using the above and assuming for a moment that consumers spend their cash inline with how they spend their digital wallets, this implies that for 2024, a QSR restaurant knocking back cash would have declined its potential share of $2.75 billion over the first 3 quarters of the 2024 Calendar Year!
So while customer experience should always come first, there's certainly still a lot of money being left on the table (pun intended) when it comes to blocking cash.
For more information on how Fonto tracks consumer expenditure across brands and categories, reach out to insights@fonto.com.au
