To say nothing of looking up in a book sent weekly a list of stolen credit card numbers or slightly later making a phone call that would take at least a minute.
Plus back in the ‘submit your sales on paper’ days it would be a week or so to get paid. Now it’s typically three days, or overnight if you want to pay extra.
True, generally if a large Corporate business has done the number crunching, they know what they are doing.
The issue generally is with small businesses, often Sole Proprietorships that maybe do not even have an accountant, just a tax guy. The owners sees the Credit card fees every month, which pisses him/her off. But what they don’t see is the little hidden costs of cash handling. After all, an extra half hour a day with a manager and the employee counting, recounting and checking the cash is just part of payroll. Such owners have no idea there is any cost to handling cash.
Still, there may be circumstances where small businesses are better of going either cash only or cashless. There are a bunch of variables these days, from location to age of typical customer to a bunch more I can’t think of at the moment.
This is why I insist on having folks with recent store experience on project teams that are going to impact store processes. They are probably overridden way too often.
Then the projects crash and burn when we find out the added complexity we introduced needed a lot more training and even a different kind of worker than we actually have. This usually happens when some 20-something consultants convince our executives that some technology we don’t fully understand is the solution to a problem we didn’t even realize we had.
Well, California is currently around 5% of personal autos being electric and newly sold are around 15% electric. So not a sudden crash, but selling gas here is headed down even now.
Bringing it back to this thread’s topic, I expect gas stations in California are going to be leaning in to the convenience store business model even more. That is, high mark-ups on everything, even gas. Californians are already acclimated to high gas prices; it’s only going to get worse.