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The story
Credit card and QR code payment fees can eat up 3-4% of sales, and with food and labor costs continuing to climb, more restaurants are ditching cashless to dodge those fees and go back to cash-only — a story that got picked up on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyou G board. In the thread, the management-side view that profits could jump significantly once the fees disappear clashed with worries about the hassle of carrying cash and what to do if a customer doesn’t have any when the bill comes. Posters also brought up how the sense of cashless adoption differs between the city and the countryside, along with grumbling about shops that switched to cash-only without passing any of the saved fees back to customers.
“We’re Done With Cashless”: The ‘Cash Comeback’ Spreading Among Restaurants — Why, and What’s Next
Behind the growing number of restaurants switching from cashless back to cash is the sheer weight of payment processing fees.
Credit card and various QR code payment fees often run around 3-4% of sales, and with food and labor costs continuing to climb, that’s become a cost low-margin restaurants can no longer afford to overlook.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
On a profit basis, fees are eating tens of percent of it, that's the real issue.
Ditch cashless and doubling your profit is totally plausible.
Might be different out in the countryside though.
That's just on the customer for not bringing cash…
It doesn't matter as much as you'd think — that's why Lopia (a bargain supermarket chain) is packed even in Tokyo.
Consumers basically only look at the price.
Whether a place is cashless almost never factors into the decision anyway.
So it comes down to "do I carry a fat wallet then?" and in the end you just shrug and go "eh, whatever" (the classic noncommittal brush-off).
That's fine though.
Cashless true believers can go pay a premium for convenience.
If you don't want a few percent skimmed off into thin, skimpy food, it's time for cash-only places to carve out their own niche.
I get that there's a chunk of people who say cash is dirty or a wallet's too heavy to carry, though.
for people who only pay cash,
what do you do when shopping online?
Convenience store or ATM payment, I'd guess.
Barely anyone is truly cash-only for everything.
I bet a decent number of people only use a credit card for Rakuten and Amazon.
Surely even they use a card for online shopping, right?
I didn't realize until right before paying, after I'd already finished eating.
I only had cash on me, and figured it'd be bad if they called it dine-and-dash, so I waited for an opening and bolted.
Lol dine-and-dash for real
Lmao straight-up dine-and-dash
So you did run after all, dying laughing
Nah I wasn't saying it's wrong, just wondering what you actually do.
Guess you'd have no choice but to turn yourself in for dine-and-dash.
Nah.
Cashless spread to avoid physical contact during the pandemic.
I think, man, you're a step behind.
Link it to your phone already, I think.
All you need these days is your phone.
Sounds like you'd be screwed if you lost your phone though.
What app is everyone even tapping with?
Even if cashless is more convenient, the moment you say "okay, since it's convenient, please pay the fee," customers suddenly don't want that either.
"It's convenient so let me use it" but "I'm not paying the fee for it" — makes you wonder if they really think it's that convenient.
They were choosing between dropping cashless or raising prices, and chose to drop cashless — getting complained at for that must be rough.
If you calculate the mental bandwidth those things drain from society, it's gotta be a net loss.
I wish all these point programs would get consolidated into My Number points and let you apply them to taxes and utility bills.
It really is a system where consumers tend to come out behind.
The amount you actually gain is so tiny you might as well just ignore it from the start.
I've seen station staff grill two different people in just one month because their phone died and they couldn't exit the station.
And the staff weren't just going "uh-huh, sure" either — they were dead set on collecting the fare no matter what.
If your phone dying means you can't pay, why not just manage your battery properly?
Using your phone enough to run it dead and still not carrying a power bank tells you everything you need to know.
Even with battery left, I'm too scared of a sudden malfunction to go phone-only.
I always make sure to keep a few thousand yen cash in my wallet.
Though apparently I'm also too scared of battery-explosion incidents to ever buy a power bank.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Credit card and QR code payment fees are said to run around 3-4% of sales, and with food and labor costs continuing to climb, that’s become a burden low-margin restaurants can’t afford to ignore. It’s now surfacing as a swing back toward “cash only.” Where the thread split was over where to draw the line between convenience and cost. Some grumbled about shops that switched to cash-only without passing any of the saved fees back as discounts, while others pushed back, arguing it’s a bit much to demand for free the “convenience” that those very fees pay for. The gap between how cashless adoption actually feels in the city versus rural areas also came up. One thing that’s easy to overlook: switching to cash-only doesn’t necessarily mean lower prices — in some cases it was chosen as the alternative to an outright price hike, a business decision that leaves plenty of room for customer expectations and the shop’s real situation to diverge.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyou G) thread “‘We’re Done With Cashless! Cash Only From Now On’ — Restaurants Returning to Their Roots Are Surging.”
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