Students and commuters alike are facing increasingly long walks to find retailers willing to top up their HOP transport card, the transport payment initiative owned by Snapper.
HOP top-ups are increasingly hard to come by. Photo: Amy Baker
While commuters were once able to top up their bus passes at many dairies and convenience stores, the number in the CDB who are willing to provide the HOP top up service has shrunk as retailers find they are losing money on the service.
Forte Convenience in Symonds St no longer offers the top up service and co-owner, Zarina Ismail says not only did her store lose money but it also lost a lot of customers who simply didn’t want to wait in line while other patrons topped up their HOP cards.
“We had one machine, and sometimes there was three of us [cashiers] trying to get to one machine and we couldn’t look after other customers who were.. not doing HOP, who wanted to buy something.”
Snapper charges $70 per month for the rental of the magnetic unit used to put money onto the card and retailers are bound by contract for the first year of operation. For every $0.25 transaction fee charged, Snapper keeps $0.05, and while retailers retain the remaining $0.20, this isn’t enough to keep them from losing money on the service.
Another inner city convenience store that once offered the HOP service and prefers not to be named, says their losses ran over the thousand dollar mark per month.
The CBD store began manually tracking transactions when it realised the transaction reports that were supplied by Snapper differed greatly from records the cashier was keeping instore.
“We started to track the records and we could see the discrepancy. Money was deducting every day. We are talking thousands of dollars… per month,” says the convenience store worker.
However rather than confront Snapper, the store pulled out of the scheme as it had “lost quite a bit of money already”.
The small CBD store still regrets not having stopped the service sooner.
“I think a lot of owners are probably on the same page. They just figure that it’s not worth it; because it is just going to take a lot of money and time and effort… It’s just a shame that we didn’t find out earlier so we could have minimised the loss.”
Ms Ismail of Forte Convenience agrees. “It’s better now. Our staff are less stressed.”