Standing in her children's play centre in Nicholls, Let's Play Indoor Playground & Cafe owner Caitlin Beaton told customers in a video on her business page she needed to run 687 birthday parties a year just to cover the $240,000 in rent and GST.
Mrs Beaton said she normally avoided political discussions on her business page, but felt compelled to ask families to pay in cash so her small business could survive another cost imposed by the federal government.
The cost she was referring to was the removal of all credit card surcharges, a federal measure scheduled to take effect from October.
Mrs Beaton said cash had never been the easy option.
Staff needed floats, someone had to make time to visit the bank during limited opening hours and there were security worries.
"Cash is honestly a pain in the ass for a business because it creates so much more burden," Mrs Beaton said. "Yet it seems like the best option moving forward ... we need it to pay the bills. There's no way we can skim off the top because we would be short every month".
What pushed her to speak out publicly was seeing how much card fees had eaten into her bottom line.
Through her booking system, Roller, about $14,700 in transaction fees went straight to the banks between October and June.
"I went and had a look at it the other day, and I was surprised to see ... it was 14,700 from October to June," Mrs Beaton said.
"So if we're now being asked to absorb that money, and we're already running on like paper-thin margins, I can't even express that enough. How do we find that extra money?".
Her appeal for customers to use cash appeared to resonate immediately.
The day after her video went out, she found more notes and coins coming across the counter, even for five-dollar purchases.
"Yesterday I was in, and we had a lot more cash come in than we normally would," she said.
"People were like, 'oh, here's the cash.' It was almost like this knowing look, like 'I saw the video' ... it was kind of like, we've got your back".
For Mrs Beaton, that response reinforced her sense that Let's Play was more than a play centre.
It was a community hub, kept alive by locals who understood why some businesses suddenly wanted the rustle of notes and clink of coins back in their tills
Across town in Civic, one of Canberra's longest-running shoe shops has been grappling with the same dilemma.
At Civic Shoes, owner Miltiadis "Milton" Vassiliotis has been behind the counter for 53 years, long enough to remember when everything went through the till.
"We've seen everything - before GST, after GST, when it was all cash, then all cards," Mr Vassiliotis said. "There was a period where 98 per cent of our payments were cards."
Unlike many retailers, he has refused to pass the cost straight on to customers. "I'm against the surcharge," he said. "We've been here so many years, we never surcharged our customers. It's not nice - I don't want to surcharge customers."
Instead, Mr Vassiliotis tried a quieter intervention. He put up a small sign explaining the cost of electronic payments and that the shop preferred cash, without telling anyone what to do.
The effect was immediate on the repair side of the business.
"Before the sign, maybe 2 per cent was cash and 98 per cent card," Mr Vassiliotis said. "After the sign, it's about 20 per cent cash and 80 per cent cards - for repairs, not for the expensive shoes."
High-value purchases are still almost entirely tap-and-go. "If the shoes are $200, $300, $400, $500, they pay by card," he said. The quiet shift has been in the smaller jobs: heels, stitching and resoles .
Like Mrs Beaton, Mr Vassiliotis is watching the federal ban on surcharges with a wary eye, not because he wants to charge extra, but because he worries what happens next.
"At the moment the banks charge around 1 per cent on cards - except American Express, which is more like two and a half," he said. "What happens now depends on the banks."
His fear is that if fees don't fall, the cost will simply be buried elsewhere. "You'll see businesses increase their prices to get that surcharge back," he said, pointing to cafes and takeaway outlets already operating on thin margins
