Shonky bakery

Todays submission is a Shonky Bakery. They removed their EFTPOS and went cash only, while installing a private operated ATM having a $2.50 transaction fee.

Credit:News.com.au
Fury at bakery’s ‘dodgy’ rule

Customers at a rural Aussie bakery have been left outraged after the owner decided to put an ATM inside, with people slamming the “dodgy” practice.

The bakery, which is not named, made the decision to change to cash only payments and instead have an ATM in store for customer’s to use.

The only problem is that every transaction incurs a $2.50 fee, meaning customers are having to pay more.

A photo of the machine was uploaded to Reddit by user jigsaw153 with the caption: “Local country bakery removes eftpos and goes ‘cash only’. Places private ATM in the corner, every transaction incurs a $2.50 fee.”

The post quickly racked up over 14,000 upvotes, with users expressing their outrage at the blatant rip off.

“This looks like a business that doesn’t want business,” one person commented

“I refuse to spend money anywhere that is cash only. I never carry cash and won’t use an ATM so I can get a sausage roll and a coke,” another said.

Others slammed the practice as “dodgy”, with one pointing out it could also make them a target for thieves.

“Also makes them an easy target. Cash only in a small town means there’s probably cash on the premises over night,” they said.

Check the comments on the reddit post regarding the C-store in the US.

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It certainly sounds like the Wangan Bakery which is south-west of Innisfail in FNQ.

Here is the link to the review I gave them on TripAdvisor on 23.06.2018.

https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g14990628-d12461708-Reviews-Wangan_Bakery-Wangan_Queensland.html

image

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Good find @PhilT, if businesses increase this practice it will be a lot more fees for consumers.

@Fred123, you were ahead of the game on this one. Nice work on the review

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The extra dough they are making is certainly getting a rise out of a lot of people :rofl:

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I suppose the bakery thinks it is winning as it gets (short term) income for renting the floor space and also royalties for use of the private ATMs. What they possibly don’t realise is the customer hates being ripped off with unreasomable fees and will likely go elsewhere in the long run.

Maybe they have been persuaded by the marketing spin, such as…“you are providing your customers convenient access to their cash when they need it, this encourages them to spend more within your business, its a fact customers with cash spend 20% more in store.” The 20% figure may be correct…if one has a $2.50 ATM fee to say buy a $10 pie and cream bun, the additional money spent is $2.50 for the fee…just over 20%.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Cash Only Businesses

Seems ‘yours’ is not a shonky bakery then. They did not go from accepting EFTPOS to cash only, and installing a private ATM, all without having other convenient major no-fee ATMs nearby.

A few might be cooking their books as well as their products, but locally quite a few small businesses with low price items and low typical $ per sale (such as bread shops) seem to be clinging to cash-only to keep (or make it appears they keep) their prices rock bottom and thus help maintain their custom from being stolen by groceries and chains. Good products alone are not always enough to overcome convenience in these times.

Taking plastic requires them to hire or buy a terminal even if via a mobile app and reader, and pay a processing company. Even if only ~$50 pcm for the privilege of taking plastic consider the work involved vs margins they work in. Most here are family businesses with very few staff, quintessential mum and pop shops.

Is that shonky? I think not whereas the Wangan Bakery is, considering the history and locality.

As this topic is Shonky bakery feel free to start a new topic about cash vs cashless businesses where it may gain exposure.

edit: New Topic Started and some posts moved there

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Literally - 'shonky, Dishonest, unreliable, or illegal, especially in a devious way".

There are two ways of looking at the circumstances. For an alternate viewpoint.

It might be the example bakery near Cairns is just not all that consumer minded in it’s outlook. The bakery in removing it’s POS facility might also have had enough of the business banking system and costs of providing payment options other than cash.

I’m not convinced that what has transpired is shonky or just a very poor business decision.
They are not the only bakery doing cash only business. As you suggest there are reasons a small business might choose not to have a POS. Some are very legitimate? The decisions of any business to not provide POS, and if there are no other facilities in the area to have an ATM made available, are both totally within consumer law. The bakery could have dropped POS and done nothing more.

From my experience paying 30c per litre more for fuel at Belyando Corssing Roadhouse than 200km up the road at Charters Towers is many things that I might object to. The price is as shown on the bowser, there is only one grade of unleaded, and it is real petrol. Considering the history and locality perhaps not a shonky, just looking after their business.

Perhaps the better response here is to consider whether all small business with an annual turn over of more than a nominal figure should be required by law to provide POS. That’s in anticipation of a national move to a cashless economy?

Good for the government, good for the big credit and financial institutions, and nothing not so good for the consumer that a little marketing will not gloss over? The shonky here may be the cost to consumers of using ATM’s and lack of local banking facilities in small communities at a fair cost to consumers. Alternately the banks and VISA etc could provide all their store front services and facilities to small business owners for free?
How long does a small business have to wait to get it’s credit due from the POS provider?

I’m agreeing there is a shonky due here, just not with the choice of the target?

Other wise the outcome suggests every business that removes POS facilities should also be named here and join the shonky club. It may have been more appropriate, for the discussion to follow the example of the initial post and not see the one off example business named!

I agree there is scope for a separate topic that considers the pro’s and cons of a cashless society, and how likely it would see the broad consensus support of business and the community. I suspect it would likely be a difficult sell for some. Another one of those silent election commitments that emerges the week after a significant party victory.

When I travel, I carry cash for many reasons, one being that it is not uncommon to find the POS has lost comms.

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I don’t agree or suggest anyone nominated the Shonky bakery for just removing the EFTPOS facility, it was for that combined with installing a private ATM having $2.50 fee in a country town at the same time.

and as I referenced therein

I do not understand why that stands for point of sale terminal these days when it has traditionally had another meaning more appropriate and more general in nature :wink:

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This screams to me the bakery owners are in financial crisis.

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Captain Mako’s Fish & Chips in Springvale did the same thing.

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Nothing dodgy about cash. Cash is convenient, unless you are buying a car!
I don’t understand why people want to purchase a pie & coke for a fiddling $6.75 and want to charge a card.
are they going to claim it on tax from a bank statement 10 km long?
Some of the card junkies are going on as if they carry around an attache case with bricks of $100 notes.
And always tying up the queues with their waving or dissapproved this & that. pain in the neck if you ask me.
Merchant terimnals are unreliable, time consuming and expensive to administer.

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Cash is simply not very convenient for me.
There are no ATMs near my workplace within walking distance that won’t use all my lunch break to get to, it’s not always easy to find a car park near an ATM when in urgent need of cash, and the credit card I use at supermarkets (which is fee-free and rewards me generously with useful loyalty points) is not cost-effective for cash-out. When making some bigger purchases cash is not always possible depending on bank daily cash withdrawal limits.
When I do use an ATM I usually wait in line behind other people faffing around checking their balance and mis-keying their withdrawal amounts or whatever they do that takes so long.
Hence I rarely carry cash and use a card for almost every transaction, unless very small and I have change to cover it.
Sorry for being a pain in the neck!

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When we went to a financial adviser a few years back they recommended using a credit card with an offset account to minimise interest on a loan we had.
It can be for legitimate reasons though I do carry cash for the times I might need it. Just not as much as before.

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Cards are great too. Different currency medium for different purchases.
But it appears that some are hysterical or frightened of about cash these days.
Is it because also people arent used to handling cash. counting, fumbling, dropping?
Next time I do a large cash transaction Im going to have it is a brown paper bag with grease stains on it and look around nervously!!

On the business side people who take money often have no idea how to make change, let alone quickly and accurately.

Cash also lends itself to errors. If a till is off by $1 or $10 who wears that? The employee or the shop? Most shops are more worried if the till is in surplus than short because of customer relations that someone got short changed and might notice.

Then there are the dodgy customers who present a $10 and if the staff puts it in the drawer before making change claim it was a $20 and demand ‘correct’ change. With no evidence to the contrary, they often get the ill gotten change rather than an argument. nb. When taking cash one always needs to keep that cash in plain sight while making change, and after presenting the change to the customer only then putting the currency in the till. If the customer challenges the change the evidence is handy either way. How many are taught that?

Or how to quickly make change in any case? Only the most basic maths are required. One starts with the amount due and keeps adding change up to the amount tendered, details not for here.

Plastic protects the worker from having to pay a short till as well as the customer from being short changed (unless there is a scammer at work), and you might notice chains and others increasingly have registers that explicitly ‘tells’ the worker how much change is due for all of the above reasons, although the ‘I gave you a $20 not a $10’ still gets tried. A waved card is quicker, convenient, and less error prone as the amount charged is shown on the docket, and one should always take the docket for warranty or amount confirmation purposes.

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I think they are called POS because I remember when they were first installed we quite often referred to them as this useless POS isn’t working again

A local deli used to have a posted minimum $10 card amount and tried to enforce it. They did away with that as there was customer pushback since lots of transactions were in the $5-10 range, and replaced that minimum by all plastic transactions having a 1.75% surcharge. While it can add up, it is akin to rounding to account for the absence of a penny coin, and soon the $0.05 coin.

The wonders of the cashless society our wonderful government touts. Shares in financial institutions will probably deliver and deliver and deliver to their shareholders as well as executives. Most people don’t seem to be fussed about those small amounts added for convenience any more but are still irritated by ‘the surcharges’ that could be built into the pricing as a cost of business.

One way or another we pay.

As for the bakery that started this thread, if there is an ATM there should be a decent enough processing network available, so the bakery’s motivations could reasonably be suspect, one way or another.

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