Visakhapatnam: Despite efforts by the government and other key players to widen the coverage of cashless transactions, several establishments accept credit or debit cards for various reasons. Even though one has a debit or credit card, the restaurant or shopkeeper may say that the swipe machine is not working, if he has one.
Most of the machines stop functioning because, it is claimed, the servers maintained by payment service providers for the PoS machine companies are overloaded. They are not able to take the load due to a sudden increa-se in the transactions with thousands of new machines being added daily.
“Before taking an order, we inform the customer that we can’t guarantee if that swipe machine would work properly at all times. We take orders only if they have cash. In 10 transactions, chances are that only two may be completed successfully. We have three PoS machines but we are still not sure. We are losing business because of this. We have asked the banks to rectify this but they say it will take some time,” said the manager of a restaurant on the beach road.
At some places, especially bar and restaurants, stewards take some advance payment before serving liquor to avoid an argument with the inebriated customer after a few drinks. “I can pay in cash but I don’t want to do that because if I spend all the cash at a mall or a restaurant, I will have to again go and stand in a queue at an ATM or the bank to withdraw money. Nowadays, the ‘no cash’ boards are regularly seen at the ATMs. I can pay through e-wallets but not many have the facility,” said K Padmaja of Hyderabad who was in the city.
