A customer taps a phone, a payment screen appears—and then comes the question: did the money actually reach the stall’s account? For some Singapore hawkers, the shift to digital payments has brought convenience, but also practical worries that have led them back to cash.
One of the hawkers interviewed by CNA was Anthony Low, a 55-year-old owner of three ngoh hiang and prawn-cracker stalls. After two months of finding differences between the e-payment totals recorded by his stall assistants and the amounts appearing in his bank account, he decided to return to cash-only transactions. The article does not suggest that every stall has had the same experience; it offers Low’s case as one example of the difficulties some hawkers have faced.
Other hawkers interviewed pointed to different concerns. Some said they needed cash immediately, while others were not familiar with the technology. At a beverage stall in China Square Food Centre, a notice announced that the stall would accept cash only from 9 May 2022 and would no longer take PayNow. A worker told CNA that some customers would not show the transaction page as proof of payment. During busy periods, the worker said, cash could also be more efficient because staff did not have to wait to check whether an e-payment had gone through.
These experiences sit alongside Singapore’s wider effort to encourage digital payments. In Parliament on 2 March 2023, Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment Amy Khor said that more than 70 per cent of cooked-food stallholders in hawker centres accepted e-payments. The article also reported that help for hawkers adopting technology was available at 37 hawker centres.
The Hawkers Go Digital programme, launched in 2020, encouraged e-payments and included cash bonuses for hawkers who reached a specified number of digital transactions. The article does not state the bonus amount or the transaction threshold.
Taken together, the report describes digital payments becoming more common while showing why accepting them does not necessarily mean abandoning cash. Reconciling payments, confirming that a transaction has gone through, handling busy periods, getting cash when it is needed and feeling comfortable with the technology all matter to the hawkers interviewed.
The figures also need careful reading: the reported 70 per cent refers to cooked-food stallholders who accepted e-payments, not stalls that were fully cashless. The article, published in March 2023 and updated in April 2023, does not establish today’s adoption rate or show that the experiences described represent all hawkers. Its picture is more nuanced: digital options were spreading, but some stallholders still had reasons to keep cash in the mix.
Source: Payment discrepancies, delayed transactions: Hawkers explain why they insist on cash payments, CNA
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