What I Would Do With This: Groceries
I’ve known this for years: the express line isn’t necessarily the fastest lane at the grocery store, or fastest per item, because of the overhead of the transaction (paying, getting change, etc). I knew this even before Apu spilled the beans (Mrs. Simpson, the express line is the fastest line not always. That old man up front, he is starved for attention. He will talk the cashier’s head off.) but now someone has actual data and done a real analysis.
Check is slower than credit which is slower than cash. Students are sometimes surprised that cash is faster than credit. From my observations, the fastest cash transaction will outpace the fastest credit transaction by a wide margin but there is also huge variance in credit transactions. I mean, some people have absolutely no idea what they are doing with that thing. The same can’t really be said of cash.
I’m secretly amazed every time someone behaves like it’s the first time they’ve ever swiped a credit card at a checkout line, and it’s rocket science to figure it out. Hint: you can swipe the card before the clerk finishes scanning them!
When figuring the transaction overhead, there is a huge penalty for a non-tech-savvy shopper paying with credit. Of course, there is a large overlap with the cash paying “Oh, I have exact change. Let me get my coin purse!” customer, often a senior senior citizen. (That’s not age discrimination, it’s profiling)
I know a few grocery stores where you can’t swipe the card before the clerk finishes scanning. In other places, the card readers are set up expecting you to swipe a frequent-shopper card first. Some readers make you manually chose a payment method (cash, credit, debit, etc.) whereas some just let you swipe the card. So, there is some potential for confusion if you haven’t shopped at that particular store before.
In a slightly better-designed world, all the readers would recognize that a customer who swipes a card at any time wants to pay with credit/debit (and not ask them to choose, since there’s no practical difference), since that’s really the only plausible reason why a person would swipe a credit card.
There is a practical difference between a credit transaction and a debit transaction. A credit transaction costs the merchant a fixed percentage of the amount charged while a debit transaction costs the merchant a fixed amount (the last I heard it was 17 cents). This is presumably why some merchants, such as Home Depot, have their systems set up to detect debit cards and default to that option.
Curious, that. Anyway, I should have said, “no difference from the customer’s standpoint”.