April 3, 2006

By Peter Kenny

Asda, the supermarket giant, has announced that it is to stop accepting cheque payments. The retailer is rolling out a trial in twenty one of their stores within the M25.

Customers who still wish to pay for their goods with a cheque will only have three more weeks to do so. After the initial three weeks the only means of payment will be with cash or a credit card.

The trial period is expected to last for eight weeks and if successful will be rolled out to the rest of the Asda store countrywide. Asda reckon this move will cut waiting times at the checkout.

An Asda spokesman said, "The idea behind it is to see whether it speeds up time at the check-out. Cheques do take time and we know queues are a bugbear. Paying by cheque is more time consuming than by card or cash."

The use of cheques has been steadily declining over the years with the peak for cheque use back in 1990 with 11 million cheques issued a day, the figures are now much lower at 6 million cheques a day. Compare this figure to the use of credit and debt cards at just fewer than 23 million transactions a day.

The uses of cheque books are expected to fall to 3.5 million transactions per day by 2014.

Shell has already taken the step to stop accepting cheques last year in all of it’s 586 stations.

This move by Asda heralds the latest move away from the usage of cheques to the convenience of. We will no doubt see many more retailers and stores taking the same steps in the near future.