NGA Releases Grocery Retailing Payments Study

Credit and debit now exceed 60 percent of dollar sales, followed by cash at 23.1 percent. While check usage in the grocery channel has fallen to single digits as a percentage of sales, they continue to have the highest average transaction value at $63.21. The average transaction size across all forms of payments stands at $27.65, with weekly transactions per store averaging 11,000.

The most commonly used payment technologies include a point-of-sale at the service desk, check cashing and Western Union, offered by at least half of grocery stores.

Two-thirds of grocery retailers do not yet image checks. Among those that do, check imaging in the back office is more common than in-lane.

One-third of grocers have some kind of online ordering system in place. An additional 8 percent are planning on adding online ordering in the next two years.

At 71 percent of companies, cashiers are involved with counting tills. The majority of companies (94 percent) have a second person counting the drawers as well, typically bookkeepers or front-end managers. About half of stores benchmark and track the time it takes to count drawers, which averages 7 minutes.

 Six in 10 companies have automated over-short reports that they share throughout the company to limit and prevent shrink: 80 percent share the findings with store operations; 53 percent with loss prevention and 47 percent with internal audit.

While 12 percent never do store cash audits, most companies do them either weekly (20 percent) or quarterly (28 percent). The chosen methods vary: 38 percent do surprise store cash audits and 33 percent conduct both surprise and planned ones. Companies spend three hours to conduct an audit.

72 percent of checks in the grocery channel tend to be ACH with the remaining 28 percent being payroll, WIC or other checks. Slightly more than three-quarters of stores cash payroll checks.