Livemint: UPI's QR code has quietly retired the kirana store's toffee-for-change jar
According to Livemint, the jar of toffees that shopkeepers once handed out in place of small change has all but disappeared from kirana stores and pharmacies across India. The publication links this to UPI, the instant phone-to-phone payment system, which it says has rewritten the payment experience for customers and merchants over the past ten years. Some, Livemint notes, even argue that an unintended consequence of the UPI revolution has been a secular decline (a long-term fall rather than a temporary dip) in candy sales. The candy is a sideshow. The real point is that the QR code has become how small merchants get paid.
What this means
When a customer scans a merchant's QR code and pays through UPI, the exact amount moves digitally, so the old problem of finding a few rupees in coins simply goes away. Livemint's framing is that this has changed everyday payments at both ends of the counter: customers no longer need cash, and shopkeepers no longer need to keep loose change on hand. The groups most visibly affected are small neighbourhood businesses such as kirana stores and pharmacies, whose routine transactions are exactly the low-value, high-frequency kind where small change used to run short. The article does not quantify how far this shift has gone, so the toffee jar is an anecdote, not a statistic. For bankers, the question to watch is what this widespread merchant adoption of QR payments leads to next, and the article itself does not answer that.
Most affected: Small merchants and retail payments
Key takeaway: Treat the small merchant with a QR code as a core digital-payments customer, and watch how adoption at kirana stores and pharmacies develops from here, since Livemint's account rests on anecdote rather than hard data.
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