72 per cent expect to pay by card in a restaurant — the debate is missing the till

What happened

On 17 September 2026 the German press agency dpa distributed the results of a YouGov survey conducted on 14 September 2026 among more than 3,600 adults in Germany; the comparison survey of 16 March 2025 covered 1,259 people. No commissioning party is named in the report. The question was where cashless payment ought to be possible. Restaurants come in at 72 per cent, up from 67 per cent the year before, supermarkets at 71 up from 66 per cent. The jumps are sharper where cash-only is still most common: bars, bistros, cafés and pubs from 50 to 59 per cent, bakeries from 46 to 53, ice cream parlours from 41 to 50, snack bars from 40 to 48, kiosks from 36 to 45 per cent. The dpa version additionally names retail shops at 66 per cent as well as car parks, airports and railway stations at over 60 per cent; markets and funfairs remain below 35 per cent. In every situation surveyed the figure is above the previous year's.

Who it affects

Hospitality, bakeries, kiosks, snack bars and market traders — that is, precisely the businesses with small average basket sizes, for which every transaction fee weighs most heavily in relative terms.

What it means

These figures land in the middle of the debate about the planned mandatory card acceptance, and they shift the point of contention. On 16 September the retail association argued that an obligation was unnecessary because retail tills have long offered both anyway. For organised retail that is largely true — the EHI study of May 2026 puts the card share of turnover at 65.1 per cent, with just under 90 per cent of card payments contactless. But the YouGov figures show where the expectation gap actually sits: at the kiosk, in the ice cream parlour, at the snack bar. There, expectation has risen by eight to nine points year on year, and there the sign with the minimum spend is still hanging.

For a business with 8-euro tickets this is not a question of attitude but an arithmetic problem. Anyone paying a fixed fee per transaction on amounts like that loses a noticeable part of their contribution margin on every card payment — that is the real reason for the minimum-spend sign, not convenience. The answer to it is neither an obligation nor defiance, but a tariff that fits small tickets: fees in per cent rather than in cents, no minimum-spend clause in the contract, and a terminal that can handle the lunchtime peak. Whoever does not do this calculation is not deciding the matter — they are leaving it to the customer, who walks on to the next door.

What to do now

1. Work out your own average ticket size over the past three months and check the terminal statement against it: how much is left on a typical small amount after all the fees?
2. Abolish minimum-spend signs if the maths allows it — and if it does not, go through the payment network operator contract for fixed amounts per transaction before turning the customer away.
3. Clarify in writing in the contract which schemes can be switched on without a price change. If mandatory acceptance arrives in 2027, negotiating as an obliged customer goes worse than it does today.