Try paying with cash at a growing number of Sutherland Shire businesses and you’ll get an apologetic shrug and a gesture towards the card reader. The cashless trend that’s been creeping through Sydney for years has firmly arrived in the Shire, and it’s generating more debate than you might expect.

I spent a week talking to business owners across the area — from Cronulla’s cafe strip to the industrial workshops of Taren Point — to find out how the shift is playing out on the ground.

The Numbers Tell the Story

According to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s latest payments data, cash now accounts for less than 13% of all consumer payments in Australia. That’s down from 27% in 2019. In younger demographics — the 18-35 bracket that makes up a significant portion of Cronulla and Miranda’s weekend foot traffic — cash usage is below 8%.

For Shire business owners, that shift has reached a tipping point. When fewer than one in ten of your customers wants to pay cash, maintaining the infrastructure to handle it starts looking like an expensive inconvenience rather than a service.

“We still accept cash, but we went three full days last week without a single cash transaction,” said the owner of a busy lunch spot near Cronulla Mall. “I’m paying for a safe, I’m paying for cash collection, I’m spending time doing cash reconciliation at the end of every day. For what? Maybe $200 a week in cash sales?”

Who’s Gone Fully Cashless

A cluster of newer hospitality venues in Cronulla have been cashless from day one — the economics simply made more sense. But it’s spreading to less obvious businesses too.

A physiotherapy practice in Caringbah went cashless in January after calculating that cash handling was costing them roughly $3,200 per year in bank fees, safe rental, cash collection services, and staff time spent counting and reconciling. Their cash transactions had dropped to about 6% of revenue.

A hair salon in Miranda made the switch late last year. A personal training studio in Gymea has been card-only since it opened in 2025. Even a mechanic in Engadine told me he’d stopped accepting cash for anything other than small parts — the liability of having cash on premises wasn’t worth it.

“Insurance is cheaper without cash on site,” he said. “That alone was enough to convince me.”

The Holdouts and the Pushback

Not everyone’s on board. Several business owners I spoke with said they’d never go fully cashless, for a mix of practical and philosophical reasons.

A fruit and vegetable shop on Kingsway in Miranda pointed out that a significant portion of their older customer base — retirees from the surrounding suburbs like Sylvania, Oyster Bay, and Como — still prefer cash. “I’m not going to tell an 80-year-old who’s been shopping here for twenty years that their money’s no good,” the owner said. “That’s just rude.”

There’s also the merchant fee issue. Every card transaction costs the business between 0.5% and 1.8% depending on the card type and payment provider. For high-volume, low-margin businesses — think fish and chip shops, bakeries, convenience stores — those fees eat into already thin profits.

A bakery owner in Jannali did the maths for me: on $8,000 worth of weekly card transactions, she’s paying between $40 and $144 in merchant fees. “Over a year, that’s somewhere between $2,000 and $7,500 just for the privilege of accepting my customers’ money,” she said. “Cash doesn’t have a transaction fee.”

She accepts cards — she has to — but she offers a small discount for cash to encourage it. A few other Shire businesses are doing the same.

The Technology Side

For businesses that have embraced the shift, the technology has gotten remarkably simple. Square readers, which dominated the early wave, have been joined by a host of competitors — Tyro, Zeller, ANZ’s own POS systems — and the hardware costs have dropped to almost nothing. Some providers give the terminal away for free and make their money on transaction fees.

The more interesting development is the integration with business management software. Modern payment terminals don’t just take money — they connect directly to accounting packages, inventory systems, and customer loyalty programs. A cafe in Engadine showed me how every transaction automatically updates her Xero accounts, tracks which menu items are selling, and even logs customer visit frequency for her loyalty program.

“I used to spend two hours every Sunday doing bookkeeping,” she said. “Now it’s basically done automatically. Going cashless wasn’t really about the cash — it was about everything that connects to the payment system.”

The Accessibility Question

There’s a genuine accessibility concern that doesn’t get enough attention in the cashless conversation. Not everyone has a bank card. People experiencing financial hardship, some elderly residents, teenagers, and tourists from countries where cash is still dominant can all be excluded by cashless-only policies.

Sutherland Shire Council hasn’t taken an official position on cashless businesses, but a councillor I spoke with acknowledged they’re watching the trend. “We want our local business areas to be welcoming to everyone,” she said. “If a significant number of businesses in a precinct go cashless, that creates barriers for some community members.”

It’s a balancing act. Business owners have legitimate reasons to prefer card-only operations. But a community that’s inaccessible to people without a bank card isn’t really serving everyone.

Where This Is Heading

The direction is clear. Cash isn’t disappearing overnight — the Reserve Bank has been explicit that it will continue to produce and distribute physical currency — but its role in everyday transactions is shrinking year on year.

For Shire businesses, the practical question isn’t whether to accept cards (everyone does), but whether to continue accepting cash. And increasingly, the answer is no — or at least “only reluctantly.”

My sense from talking to dozens of business owners is that within two or three years, the majority of hospitality and service businesses in Cronulla, Miranda, and Hurstville will be functionally cashless. The suburban shops — your local butcher in Gymea, the newsagent in Mortdale — will hold on longer, partly out of customer loyalty and partly because their demographics skew older.

Whatever your position on the trend, it’s worth carrying a card in the Shire these days. Your cash might not get you as far as it used to.