Cash to Dominate Holiday Season Spending Trend for 2015

Despite the rise of new options at the cashier, cash still seems to be the preferred payment method for holiday shoppers.

A study by Bankrate and Princeton Survey Research Associates International suggests that over 39 percent of customers are inclined to pay for goods and services using banknotes.

“If you take people at their word that this is how they’re going to get through the holidays, it’s really a reflection of what occurred during the Great Recession,” said Mike Cetera, an analyst at Bankrate.

The same study was conducted last year by the group, which yielded very similar results. In 2014, roughly 38 percent of shoppers were committed to using cash at the register during Black Friday.

When it comes to credit card trends, high income households making an average of $75,000 per year are are likely to charge their expenses instead of using cash. However, the majority of the demographic (38 percent) still prefer to use traditional debit cards.

On the other end of the spectrum, the least popular ways to check out during the holiday season includes digital wallets and checks, which accounted for one percent of the sample.

“Mobile payments, in the U.S. and worldwide, has been in a state of hyper-kinetics ever since Apple Pay launched last fall as an in-store and in-app mobile payments solution. When that happened, just about everyone publicly declared that it was ‘game over’ for anyone else with any mobile payments ambitions – past, present or future,” MPD CEO Karen Webster wrote in a recent column.

“Since then, we’ve seen Android Pay and Samsung Pay launch, Visa Checkout and MasterPass gain more merchant acceptance and registered users; PayPal make acquisitions, separate from eBay, and go public — and lots of new and niche players have fought for attention.”