Petrol dealer spokesman to PSVs: Go cashless

Petrol station operators have flatly rejected calls from the public service vehicle (PSV) industry for secure, dedicated spaces to count cash, insisting the suggestion is both impractical and makes little business or security sense.

The dealers’ spokesman, Aldo Ho-Kong-King, dismissed as “nonsense” a proposal for allotted spaces inside their establishments to count money in safety when PSVs refuel.

Last week, the two main PSV associations—the Alliance Owners of Public Transport (AOPT) and the Association of Public Transport Operators (APTO)—demanded urgent action from petrol station operators to protect drivers, who are routinely forced to count large sums of cash in public, from the threat of robbery and assault when refuelling.

Chairman of AOPT, Roy Raphael, and his APTO counterpart, Anwar Nana, appealed to petrol suppliers to allocate space inside their establishments, away from public view, to enable cash handling in a safe and discreet manner as a matter of urgency, while at the same time urging Ho-Kong-King, president of the Petroleum Dealers Association of Barbados (PDAB), to meet with them without delay to address the issue.

But Ho-Kong-King argued that the idea of allocating space to count money is a bad one, making no business or even security sense for the stations.

He said he is certain that the overwhelming majority of businesses will not give up any space for such an undertaking.

Ho-Kong-King told Barbados TODAY: “We will not entertain that at all. That would be a waste of time. No dealer will entertain that. Our marts are way too small; there is no space in them. Every square foot is a revenue maker. They need to go cashless. That’s the future. The future is not for us to put in…it makes no sense. If you come and put a hundred dollars in there, we make $10 on every hundred dollars they put in…and we are going to give them square-footage that we sell goods in to count cash? That doesn’t make any sense. I will put it [the idea] with the other dealers, but I will never do that.” 

Declaring that staff would “have to sit down on top of each other” if ZR and minibus drivers were allowed to use any space, Ho-Kong-King further contended that every square foot of space in the automart stores outsells any revenue that refuelling by the PSVs could bring in.

“I can’t see anybody going for that. Square footage is way, way too precious,” he said. “I feel their pain, but I think that…it doesn’t take long to go cashless. It reduces significantly, counting lots of coins. They could go and get mobile credit card machines. Why wouldn’t they go and use mobile credit card terminals? I know why they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to pay a hundred dollars for the terminal a month, and they don’t want to pay two per cent on a transaction; but that’s the reality of it. 

“All the staff who are always looking for change to pay them, they will be using their debit cards, because everybody practically gets paid into their bank accounts now. They don’t get cash. I will put it [the allocation suggestions] to a couple of them [the dealers], but I am 95 per cent sure that nobody is going to entertain that.”

The petrol station and automart owner was strident in his opposition to the cash-counting proposal: “It also poses another risk counting a lot of money inside the stations too… because people know that busmen coming in there counting money. The busmen themselves know they going in there counting money; and half the rest are your staff telling other people what’s going on. I will ask a question, but, honestly, it is an absolute waste of time…it’s a nonsensical thing; it is stupid. I will tell you that straight out. It’s nonsense. Anybody that does it, does it because they don’t really understand business. Putting somebody in there to count money makes no sense. None whatsoever.” 

He queried where else in the world anybody goes into another person’s business and counts their money.

“That’s putting your problems into somebody else’s hands at the end of the day. Yes, it might be their customers, but we have thousands and thousands of customers. Whatever we do for one, we got to do for another,” Ho-Kong-King insisted.

AOPT Chairman Roy Raphael said he would be promoting the new digital national Instant Payment System (IPS) among his members to reduce reliance on cash, but also called for an immediate halt to the practice of PSV drivers dealing with money in full public view.

“Less cash is better for us,” Raphael told Barbados TODAY. “We want to have a meeting with the petrol station suppliers soon, especially the president of the Petroleum Dealers Association. We are very concerned . . . actually, we have had discussions with them two years ago and we told them that we were concerned about how the cash was being counted at the petrol stations; and it recently fell on deaf ears.

“Outside is a security risk. I don’t like it. It poses a threat especially to those persons who work late at night; and I am asking that this practice be discontinued among all the suppliers that supply us with petrol.”

APTO Chairman Anwar Nana also expressed concern about the practice and indicated the need for a meeting with the Petroleum Dealers Association to resolve this security risk.

Nana told Barbados TODAY: “In this day and age, it makes no sense displaying sums of cash. It might only be $300 or $400, but because of the denominations, the lot of bills, silver dollars, it looks like a lot of money. It is common sense and best practice right now to be as discreet as possible when dealing with cash.

“It would be a good idea to make representation to the Petroleum Dealers Association to have a common policy or practice to use inside the petrol stations. That would be a good idea for them to allocate somewhere for us to be out of the limelight.” 

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb