SWANSEA: The earring maker who still takes cash at markets, and the hour it costs her to bank it

Ellie Jones has two jobs and one rule for market day: take the cash.

The Swansea maker behind Ear Candy Handmade UK, a zero-waste polymer clay earring brand she started in 2020, says the sums are simple. “Taking cash at markets is great because there are no card fees involved, which can make a real difference for a small business,” she said.

The catch comes afterwards. “Depending on where I’m working, paying that cash into a bank branch could easily add an extra hour onto my day.”

That hour matters because Ear Candy is squeezed around a full-time job as a greetings card designer. “Time is literally everything to me,” she said. “Ear Candy is my side business and I fit it in wherever I can. Anything that makes the practical side of running the business quicker and easier gives me more time to focus on making my products, attending markets and growing the business.”

Her fix is the counter closest to home. “Being able to deposit my market takings at my local post office is more convenient and means I can spend that time back with customers or working on new earring designs.”

Ear Candy’s earrings are made with hypoallergenic surgical steel, with a sterling silver upgrade for sensitive ears, packed in recycled or reused materials and made mostly from UK-sourced supplies. Ellie says she makes and packs every piece herself.

Why the Post Office wants you to hear this

Ellie’s story reaches us through the Post Office, which commissioned a OnePoll survey of 500 small business owners, sole traders and side hustlers and would like more of them paying their takings in over its counters.

Its findings, as the Post Office presents them: 58% say their business would struggle if it could only take cards, 71% agree that “cash is king”, and owners reckon 29% of the payments they receive are in notes and coins. Counting, managing and banking that cash takes them 178 hours a year, the Post Office says, or 22 working days.

A third say they have skipped a break to get to the bank and 13% have shut the shop to do it. Seven in ten have put off paying money in for want of time, and of those, 61% kept the takings at home and 26% carried them around.

The card machine has its own costs, the survey says. Asked what puts them off going further down the card route, 43% named processing fees, 27% the dependence on technology and 19% the hit to cash flow while payments clear, and 11% would rather take cash only.

“Cash flow is the lifeblood of many small businesses, but depositing cash shouldn’t become a burden,” said Ben Hunter Woollard, the Post Office’s head of banking. “What seems like a simple trip to pay in takings can often mean valuable time away from customers and running the business.”

Where the counters are going

The survey lands as the bank counters keep closing. Lloyds shuts its Gorseinon branch on 12 October, leaving Principality as the town’s last provider, with a banking hub at 20 High Street due to take over, its counter run by Post Office staff. Mumbles got its hub in May, joining Morriston.

The “local post office” is not always there either. Kidwelly has been without one since March, with the town’s MP asking for a mobile van while a community group works to reopen the Station Road branch.

The customers are moving the other way. Fewer than half of UK adults now think a wallet is essential, the cash machine network LINK found last year, with the typical person carrying £20 and 7% carrying nothing at all. LINK’s own advice was to keep some cash anyway, since almost two thirds of people have been caught out by a payment failing.

For a trader with a cash box and a day job, the question is not whether cash still works at the market stall. It is whether there is anywhere left to put it when she gets home.

Author

Kit Peters

Kit Peters is a journalist and the editor of Swansea Bay News, covering Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire since 2020.