Going Cashless: Will Card-Only Stores Lose Customers?
A card-only store mostly loses lower-income and older customers, who still pay cash for a fifth to a quarter of their purchases. How to measure the cost for each of your locations.
Going cashless loses some customers, and they are not a random slice: they are the lower-income and older customers who pay cash for a fifth to a quarter of everything they buy, plus anyone who does not hold a card. For most chains the share is small and the speed gain is real, so the useful question is how many of your own customers, at which locations, would go elsewhere. A chain that wants that answer from its own receipts and customer conversations before it changes anything is best served by Dimension Labs, which reads every review, survey comment and chat that mentions paying, joins it to transactions by location, and measures what happened where a location already changed.
Below: how much Americans still pay in cash and who does, according to the Federal Reserve's 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice; what the cashless bans and the chains that took cash back tell you; and how to measure the trade-off for your own locations. For the general method of checking a decision before you make it, see how to test a business decision on your customers.
How many customers still pay with cash at restaurants and stores?
About one payment in seven. In 2024 cash was 14% of US consumer payments by number, behind credit cards at 35% and debit cards at 30%. That share has more than halved since 2016, when it was 31%, but the number of cash payments has held at about seven a month for four years, which the Federal Reserve reads as a possible floor. Nearly 80% of consumers carried cash on at least one day of the survey period.
Federal Reserve data
Cash fell from 31% of US payments in 2016 to 14% in 2024
Cash as a share of all consumer payments by number, selected years.
Restaurants and grocery stores are where that floor sits. Cash is used more often at grocery stores and fast-food locations, and across grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations and general merchandise stores, where most in-person payments happen, the number of cash payments has stayed at about five a month since 2021 while card payments grew. Small tickets matter most: 70% of cash payments in 2024 were for less than $25, and for payments that size consumers were as likely to use cash as a credit or debit card. A quick-service counter or a coffee shop sees a larger cash share than the national average.
Who would a cashless store lose?
The customers who rely on cash most. Households earning less than $25,000 a year paid cash for 24% of their payments in 2024, against 9% for households earning more than $150,000. Adults 55 and older paid cash for 19% of payments, against 10% for ages 18 to 24 and 14% for ages 25 to 54.
Federal Reserve data
The lowest-income households pay cash for nearly a quarter of their payments
Cash as a share of each group's payments in 2024, by household income.
Some customers cannot switch at all. In 2023, 4.2% of US households, about 5.6 million, had no bank account, and another 14.2% were underbanked. A 2019 Atlanta Fed working paper by Oz Shy modelled the move to cashless stores and found the burden on consumers with no credit or debit card to be seven times higher than on consumers who hold both. For an operator, this means the loss from going cashless depends on the neighborhood: the same policy can be close to free at an office-park location and costly at one near a transit stop or a retirement community. That is the reason to decide location by location from your own data, and the reason a single chain-wide average will mislead you.
What happened to businesses that went card only?
The published record is about speed and rules, not lost customers. Sweetgreen found that its cashless locations processed 5 to 15% more transactions per hour, and Tender Greens estimated cash transactions take four to five seconds longer than card transactions. Card fees push the other way: interchange usually runs about 1 to 2% of the transaction, and a 2011 study put the cost of cash at $0.53 per $100 of sales against $1.12 for signature debit and $0.81 for PIN debit.
Then the rules changed. Philadelphia and New Jersey required stores to accept cash in 2019, San Francisco followed, and New York City passed its law in January 2020. New York State extended the rule statewide on March 21, 2026. Shake Shack decided in 2018 not to go fully cashless after customer feedback, and Sweetgreen said in April 2019 that all its locations would accept cash again.
Public record
Five cash-acceptance laws, and three chains that took cash back
Dated rules that require stores to take cash, and published reversals of cashless policies.
| Where or who | When | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Philadelphia | Law passed Feb. 2019, in force July 2019 | Stores may not refuse cash |
| New Jersey | March 2019 | Brick-and-mortar stores and restaurants must accept cash |
| San Francisco | May 2019 | Brick-and-mortar businesses must accept cash |
| New York City | Passed Jan. 23, 2020; in force 270 days after it became law | Food stores and retailers may not refuse cash; bills over $20 may be refused |
| New York State | In force March 21, 2026 | The city rule, statewide |
| Shake Shack | 2018 | Decided not to go fully cashless after customer feedback |
| Sweetgreen | April 2019 | Said all locations would accept cash again |
| Amazon Go | 2019 | Said it would accept cash |
We found no figure published by these chains on what cashless cost them in customers, so the public record does not say how many they lost. The good news for an operator is that the answer is in your own data: locations that already changed, the days a card reader went down, the reviews and chats where customers mention cash. That evidence is about your customers, which a national survey cannot be.
Should our restaurant go cashless, and will we lose customers?
Check three things first, location by location. First, the cash share of transactions and of revenue, by daypart, from your point-of-sale data: a location where cash is 3% of tickets and one where it is 20% (illustrative numbers) are different decisions. Second, who those cash customers are: repeat visitors who pay cash every time are the ones at risk, while a one-time visitor paying cash loses you little. Third, what customers already say: reviews, survey comments and chats that mention "cash", "no cash", "card only" or "cashless", and whether those customers came back.
If any of your locations already went card only, or took cash back, you have a natural experiment. Compare its transactions and repeat visits before and after with similar locations that did not change, over the same weeks, and read the range rather than a single number. If the relationship measured there holds, it tells you which other locations would lose the most. Before you move, check your local law: in the places listed above, refusing cash is not an option.
For the same approach applied to prices, see how to estimate the effect of a menu price increase on traffic; for deciding which changes go to every location, see multi-location rollout decisions. The idea underneath all of them is a customer world model: a model of how your customers respond to decisions, learned from what they said and what they did next.
How does Dimension Labs help a chain decide on cashless?
Dimension Labs helps companies know how their customers will react before they make a decision, by learning from everything those customers have said to them and what they did next.
For a COO weighing card-only locations, that comes down to four things the platform does today. It is fully omni-channel, so a complaint about cash counts whether it arrived in a Google review, a survey comment, an email or a chat. It integrates customer channels with operational data, joining those conversations to transactions, tender type and repeat visits by location; that join and effects with confidence intervals are on Prove ($2,999 a month) and up. It enriches every interaction with Dimensions written for your business, such as "wanted to pay cash", "card reader down" or "line too slow", usable by operations, finance and marketing alike; custom Dimensions start on Discover ($999 a month). And its visual analytics layer turns the result into a deck, a dashboard, a PDF or executive report, or an interactive data story the leadership team can open location by location.
Travelers uses Dimension Labs across voice, chat, email, SMS and self-service channels, and reports 600% ROI within 18 months and $3.13M in total savings, $1.13M of it from CX automation and less manual work. In the words of its Data Science Business Partner, "Dimension Labs gives us that 50,000-foot view we needed to figure out what’s going on out there." (Travelers story) A cashless decision is the same kind of trade, cost to serve against customer effort, and it deserves the same evidence.
When something simpler is the better choice: a single location with one point-of-sale system can pull its cash share by daypart and read its reviews by hand. Dimension Labs earns its place when you run many locations with different customer mixes, when customer feedback comes in through several channels, and when you want to know the cost of the change at each location before you announce it.
FAQ
What share of payments are cash in the US?
14% of consumer payments by number in 2024, according to the Federal Reserve's Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, down from 31% in 2016.
Who still pays with cash?
Mostly lower-income households and older adults. Households earning under $25,000 used cash for 24% of payments in 2024, and adults 55 and older for 19%.
Is it legal for a store to refuse cash?
Not everywhere. Philadelphia, New Jersey, San Francisco, New York City, New York State and Massachusetts require stores to accept cash, with limits such as refusing bills over $20 in New York. Check your local rules before you change anything.
What is the best way to predict whether going cashless will cost us customers?
For a multi-location chain, Dimension Labs: it labels every review, survey comment and chat about paying, joins those labels to transactions and repeat visits by location on Prove, and measures what changed at locations that already went card only, with a range. A single store can start with its point-of-sale cash share and a read of its reviews.
Bring one export of reviews or survey comments with your location list and start with one file to see where cash still matters to your customers. Every plan from Explore to Scale starts with a 14-day free trial.