Cashless stores just discovered cash still has a job

When the terminals stopped working across Invercargill and Dunedin, the businesses that coped were the ones that could still take cash. Invercargill City Council, supermarkets and pharmacies were all hit by Eftpos outages, and the council was reduced to accepting cash at its main office and facilities, or payments through its online portal.

This was not a catastrophe. It was a fault, fixed within a day. That is exactly why it is worth taking seriously. If a routine connectivity glitch can push a city council back to banknotes, the businesses that have engineered cash out of their operations should ask what a real outage would do to them.

One link failed, and the till went with it

Paymark said it was investigating a widespread connectivity issue between Spark and Paymark affecting terminal connectivity to its network. It implemented a fix on Monday morning, though reports of problems continued. FreshChoice said about 12 of its South Island stores were affected, with some contactless transactions failing. Spark confirmed the fault hit Invercargill and Dunedin terminals and apologised.

The useful detail is what did not break. Eftpos New Zealand confirmed its own network customers were unaffected, according to The Press. This was a single point of failure in one provider chain, not an industry-wide collapse. Many merchants could not have told you which chain they were on until it stopped working.

The pattern is now hard to ignore

This keeps happening. When Cyclone Gabrielle cut internet across Tairāwhiti and Wairoa in 2023, Eftpos, banking apps and ATMs went down for days, and the Reserve Bank had to fly in $41 million of physical cash to restock ATMs, as the Listener recounted in January 2026.

After the July 2024 global IT outage, Retail NZ’s then chief executive Carolyn Young said the incident revealed how reliant businesses were on technology, concluding bluntly that “cash is king, and then EFTPOS would be second”.

Now a provincial Spark-Paymark fault. Three very different causes, one outcome. Each time digital payments fail, cash turns out to be the only fallback that works without a network.

Cash use is occasional, which is the problem

The Reserve Bank’s latest Cash Use Survey shows 56.6% of people still use cash alongside other methods, flat since 2021 but down from 95.8% in 2019. More telling, 67.0% used cash two times or fewer in the past week. Cash has become a habit most people, and most businesses, practise rarely.

That erodes the muscle memory an outage demands. A business that notionally “still accepts cash” may have a thin float, staff who have not counted change in months and no plan for banking takings. Meanwhile 19.5% of people had already been turned away from a business that would not take cash in the past three months.

The risk is not evenly spread. Rural residents (65.5%) and Māori (63.7%) use cash more than urban and non-Māori populations, according to the same survey. The lower South Island’s provincial retail footprint sits squarely in that territory.

Banking the takings is getting harder

RBNZ-commissioned Litmus research in ten rural towns, published in November 2025, found 88% of rural businesses still accepted cash, 93% because customers demanded it. But 53% found getting to a cash banking service difficult or very difficult, 35% travelled more than 20km to bank cash, and only 54% felt safe doing it.

Retailers want this fixed. In its July submission to the Reserve Bank, Retail NZ reports 92% of surveyed members agree New Zealand needs a cash services standard. One member put it plainly: “A cashless society will not work if there is a major blackout, eftpos is of no use to someone wanting to purchase some products.”

Massey University’s Dr Pushpa Wood, director of the Financial Education and Research Centre, argued in March 2026 that “access to cash can materially affect how quickly people recover from short-term shocks”, calling it “a wellbeing issue, not just a payments issue.”

Don’t wait for a regulator to plan your fallback

The access-to-cash debate will grind through consultation. Businesses do not need to wait for it. Resilience here is cheap, practical and entirely within an owner’s control:

• Keep a real float. Size it for at least half a day of trade, not petty cash.
• Know your network. Find out whether your terminals run through Paymark, Eftpos New Zealand or another provider, and via which telco. Not every chain fails at once, as this outage proved.
• Map your cash banking path. With branches and ATMs thinning out, know where and how you will bank takings before you need to.
• Train staff. Counting change and running a manual process should be rehearsed, not improvised mid-queue.

None of this is nostalgia for the pre-contactless era. It sits alongside insurance, backup power and a second internet connection as basic continuity planning. Councils especially, which take rates, fees and fines from every corner of the community, have no excuse for a single-channel payment setup.

Summer is coming, with its storms, tourist peaks and stretched networks. The next outage will not announce itself. The businesses that treat cash as a live capability rather than a legacy cost will keep trading while their neighbours turn customers away.

Sources

• RNZ: South Island businesses report Eftpos outages (2026-11-02)
• The Press: South Island businesses report Eftpos outages (2026-11-01)
• NZ Herald Listener: Should you be adding cash to your emergency kit? (2026-01-05)
• RBNZ/Litmus: Research on cash use and access in ten rural towns (2025-11-13)
• Massey University: Opinion – Is RBNZ’s cash debate only about ‘access’ or something much bigger? (2026-03-09)