COVID-19 Impact on Consumer Behavior and Attitudes Towards the Use of Cash

Marketing Assignment #6: Cashless Transactions and Customer Satisfaction
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Marketing Assignment #6: Cashless Transactions and Customer Satisfaction
Part 1
1 COVID-19 and Impact on Consumer Attitudes Towards the Use of Cash
While statistics show that growing numbers of millennials and Gen Z groups are increasingly embracing cashless transactions, the cashless movement had not achieved significant success until the time when the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread through cash payments (Regine, n.d). With the fear of infections, retailers offered consumers touchless ways of completing transactions such as plastic (debit and credit cards) and mobile payments. For consumers without credit cards, retailers such as Stop and Shop, CVS, Target, and Shaw’s readily sold MasterCard and prepaid Visa cards to discourage the use of cash (Regine, n.d). Although consumers are aware of the high fees charged using touchless payments, the pandemic impacted their attitudes over the safety of this form of payment in preventing the spread of the virus. Furthermore, less wait time for customers, fast and cleaner transactions, and reduced cases of theft have become major winning points for touchless payments.
2 Other ways the pandemic affected consumer behavior
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted consumer behaviors in many other ways besides the move towards making cashless transactions. For instance, out of fear of the pandemic, people’s willingness to buy both necessities and non-necessities changed as well as the spending levels (Di Crosta et al., 2021). Government and public health regulations to contain the spread of the virus, such as social distancing and lockdowns, impacted consumer behaviors as people learned and improvised new ways of buying and shopping. For example, consumers could not go shopping at stores, but rather stores came to their homes. As observers project, these habits are likely to remain a permanent scar and become the norm in shopping (Sheth, 2020). With emerging technologies and new trends, more changes are anticipated in consumer behaviors.
Part 2
Customer Dissatisfaction and Impact on Revenue
Numerous studies have aimed at investigating the impact of the quality of services on customer dissatisfaction, especially in th...