Of course it has. It was promoted as the means to save money and it does…for the ones taking the payment. That may seem a bit cynical and probably is so. Reality is that in the past most items had the cost of supply and buying built into the price. Nowadays not only is that cost built in but as it is so opaque no one who is purchasing can determine the overheads built in. Added surcharges are also a means to increase profits (not necessarily the actual surcharge but the fact that a cost was already built into the price in the first place).
IHL Group (https://www.ihlservices.com/) have estimated that cash-handling costs range from 4.7% to 15.3%, depending on the retail segment, so that cost is almost certainly already being built in and recovered as part of the cost of the goods. So consider an example at the lowest end of that range and a consumer paying by card…The goods already cost 4.7% more because of the prospect of handling cash. The Consumer pays by card and so no cash handling required for that sale (now likely to be 77% of sales), the business further charges 1.5% card surcharge (the real total cost of an EFT transaction for the business). The consumer has paid a 6.2% increased payment because of the cost of payment built into cost of the goods to the business when the cost of providing that payment method was only 1.5%…the rest (4.7%) is business profit.
Woolworths and Coles as examples do not charge a surcharge but as they certainly make good profits you have to consider that the cost to the consumer includes provision for any such cost of providing a means of payment by the consumer…and it is completely hidden to most of us what that added cost is. That cost could be substantially more than the real cost of providing the payment method…possibly (likely?) it has it’s own markup.
An older paper/study on the various payment methods and the costs of providing such services. At the time the study was done about 75% of payments were made by cash. This has changed a great deal in the last 20 odd years and now cash is roughly only 13% of all payment methods. This has led to some changes in regards to cost of provision of cash payment methods, so take some of the results with that change in mind.
