Consumers may soon no longer have the option to pay for their Beegy Cheese Burrito (or whatever slop is on the Taco Bell menu these days) with cash if the multinational corporation that runs it has anything to say about the matter.
Via The Hill:
Is it time to put the cash away? Taco Bell and other popular fast-food chains might become digital-only in the near future.
During an earnings call earlier this month, parent company Yum! Brands, Inc. addressed plans to eventually move to 100% digital sales at its restaurants.
This includes fast food chains like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC.
Frankly, no sane person without an early death wish would regularly consume products from these vendors anyway, so if not being able to pay in cash is the incentive people need to opt for actual food, I would say it’s a godsend.
Here are the remarks from the Yum! Brands executive officers on the company’s Aug. 2 conference call, via The Motley Fool (emphasis added):
At our investor day last December, we shared our long-term vision for Yum! to deliver accelerated global growth. I’m proud to say that our second quarter results are further evidence of our ability to execute against this vision. Two of Yum!’s differentiated capabilities are bold restaurant development engine, including 1,025 gross new units in the current quarter; and our distinctive digital capabilities, which drove record digital sales, fueled the second quarter 13% growth in system sales…
And as I’m sure you’ve all heard, Taco Bell, in partnership with another global icon, LeBron James, successfully liberated Taco Tuesday in a way no other brand could mimic. As we also discussed in December, our Recipe for Good Growth strategy will be powered by digital and technology. Our distinctive digital capabilities, which enable easier experiences and greater access to our iconic brands, continue to unlock incremental sales through higher spend and frequency, as well as incremental profitability for our system. On that note, I’m pleased to report another quarter of double-digit growth, resulting in $7 billion in digital sales, representing over 45% of our global system sales.
Convenience and profitability often come at the expense of privacy, and this Yum! Brands “Recipe For Good Growth” is no exception.
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This is one of those little differences in everyday life that you generally take for granted and that only become apparent when you go abroad, but when I was still living in the United States, even many years ago, I would go weeks without ever touching cash. It was strange, in fact, to carry cash on me. Yet in many countries outside of the West, cash is still king. The overwhelming majority of in-person transactions are conducted with cash. What’s rare isn’t businesses that take cash; it’s businesses that take other forms of payment. Somehow, this never posed a logistical problem in need of a remedy. Technocrats specialize in offering solutions to problems people never knew they had.
Of course, this trend will likely disappear over time, as what happens in the West, and particularly America, has a tendency to ripple out to the rest of the world, especially with the advent of multinational governing bodies that increasingly subvert national sovereignty and local customs.
