More Valuable Work

This article is brought to you by Cash Depot.

In today’s convenience stores, workers should be spending more of their time on tasks that require a human touch, according to Doug Marquis, chief revenue officer at Cash Depot.

“When labor was cheap and stores were simpler, employees spending time counting and breaking bills might have been accepted as part of doing business,” Marquis said. “Today, every labor hour devoted to work that can be automated is an hour unavailable for activities that actually drive store growth.”

And convenience store workers have a lot to handle: Last year there were an average of 44,063 customer transactions per store, per month, according to the NACS State of the Industry (SOI) Report® of 2025 Data. 

And the employees handling those transactions come with a cost: Wages and benefits took up 30.6% of total gross profit dollars in 2025, according to the NACS SOI Report. 

With that kind of investment, “there’s a lot of pressure to get more operational value from each hour of labor,” said Marquis. “Employees’ time is valuable and would be better spent not dealing with cash management tasks.”

Customers are still using cash at the convenience store—it’s the second most common method of payment, accounting for 17.5% of transacted sales in 2025. And managing cash often takes the form of manual work, from replenishing registers and managing cash exceptions to counting deposits and making bank runs, Marquis said.

“Every time an employee goes to the back office to deal with cash, there is something on the sales floor they aren’t doing,” Marquis said. “Cash isn’t going away, so the work has to change.”

Marquis said Cash Depot’s BANK IN A BOX moves tasks like register replenishment, bill breaking and deposits away from employees and managers to an automated system. 

“Retailers should automate the process, not the payment,” Marquis said. “Good automation doesn’t replace employees. It gives the employees something more valuable to do.”

With less time spent managing cash, employees have more time to spend on merchandising, stocking, cleaning, customer service and foodservice, according to Marquis. “Workers should be making fresh food instead of running out to the bank,” he said. 

“The question isn’t whether cash takes employee time,” Marquis said. “The question is whether cash is the best use of the employee’s time.”

This is the first article in a two-part series from Cash Depot. Look out for part two, which explores how automating cash management can help reallocate labor hours.

Cash management Labor costs