Withdrawals from Royal Bank of Scotland ATMs have hit new seasonal highs, says the bank, with off-site cash machines at airports and railway stations topping the list of busy dispensers.
In the first 11 days of December, £222.3 million was withdrawn from the bank's network of 1600 cash machines - nearly two per cent up on last year. The number of withdrawals has also risen from 3,897,027 to 3,910,619.
The cash machine at Liverpool Street Station is set to be the busiest cash machine nationally once again - as it was in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
In a statement, the bank says: "This backs up the Royal Bank's policy of siting cash machines in stations, shopping centres and supermarkets, where customers want them."
Other busy machines across the country include Edinburgh Airport, Paddington Station, the Hammersmith Centre and Sainsbury's Braehead - all expected to smash through the £1 million mark by the end of the month.
According to research by Internet bank Egg, Britain’s cash hungry consumers will spend 8 million hours – or 1030 years – queuing at cash point machines in December.
Egg conducted a ‘mystery shop’ of some of the UK’s most popular shopping centres and established that the average cash machine queuing time is about 3 minutes per transaction. With an estimated 166 million transactions during the month of December, this equates to the equivalent of 1030 years of queuing.
The research, conducted on behalf of Egg by NOP, showed that 55% of all those questioned had to queue for between one and five minutes with 17% having to wait over 10 minutes in order to withdraw their cash. Of those who participated in the research, 1 in 5 found that their cash machine was either out of service or out of money – and 40% of machines on Oxford Street in London were unusable.