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Wild cash-only turnaround as Aussie's money 'disappeared': 'Matter of staying alive'

More evidence piles up to prove Australia is not ready for a cashless revolution.

Stewart Perrie
·Senior Journalist
·4-min read
Shot of Zeppole & Co from the outside next to a picture of someone holding a wad of cash
Zeppole & Co in South Australia has ditched digital payments and it couldn't have come at a better time. (Source: Instagram/Facebook)

An Australian business owner has gone cash-only to "stay alive" after being robbed of $10,000 through a dodgy EFTPOS system. The change meant that when thousands of companies were rendered useless in the dodgy EFTPOS system, Zeppole & Co was happily trading.

South Australian ice cream shop owner Stephen*told Yahoo Finance he struggled with EFTPOS outages for eight weeks before ditching digital payments completely two weeks ago. If he didn't, he feared his business would be forced to close down forever.

"Over the last month alone, our point of sale (POS) system decided to stop taking payments," he said.

"So, say we did $500 in sales in one night, it would only register $35. The rest of that money would say it went through, but in the end, it just sort of disappeared."

Despite having numerous conversations with his POS system provider and bank, the owner said the money rarely made it into his account.

He tried changing systems and banks several times, but he kept running into the same problem and the bill quickly added up to $10,000.

Two months went by and with staff and suppliers to pay, Stephen thought this could spell the end of his business.

So, he ditched all the fancy tech and now only relies on cold-hard cash.

"It's just a matter of actually staying alive and having our own money to use," he said.

"Because at the moment, you can imagine eight weeks without no pay. Suppliers, they want their money. The mortgage has to get paid. Staff have to be paid no matter what."

Zeppple & Co brought in its cash-only policy about two weeks ago and the timing couldn't have been more perfect.

When businesses across the country had to turn away customers due to the global IT outage, Zeppole was happily accepting cash.

"The support that we've got is amazing. People are coming in just because we're cash-only now, and we're stepping away from the banks and whatnot," Stephen said.

"I think if we went through that crash we would have probably had to close up as that would have been another 11 weeks without being paid."

Some customers have said the cash-only move is "dodgy", but they don't know the difficulties he has gone through.

"We're not doing it to boycott banks or anything. We're actually doing it to stay alive," he said.

Richy Marchandise, who runs the Mimolette Café in Melbourne, revealed to Yahoo Finance he had lost hundreds of dollars worth of sales because his EFTPOS machine kept breaking during peak times.

He had changed providers five times in 11 years and was sick of customers walking out.

The cafe owner even brought in a 10 per cent discount for people who use cash so that he didn't have to rely so much on the unreliable system.

Cash advocate and founder of 'Cash Welcome', Jason Bryce, told Yahoo Finance that constant EFTPOS failures only further highlight the need for physical money to be in circulation.

"Payment systems are failing, it seems to be increasing," he said. "You'd think with the increasing number of cashless transactions, the system would, one, get more reliable and, two, get cheaper.

"But it's getting less reliable and it's getting more expensive. Card surcharges are going up and there seems to be more outages.

"We all need to carry some cash in our pocket just to make sure that we don't get stranded when we're out and about."

Cash use is in decline in Australia, with the majority of people opting for digital payments.

For example, In 2007, nearly all payments under $10 were made with cash, now that has fallen to just over 20 per cent.

But there's also been backlash as the cost of using card or tap continues to rise, with surcharging a multi-billion dollar issue.

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