Cashless - Who's gone cashless and how how it effected you?

[BigRiccs]

We are a single location coffee shop/retail establishment who have gone to less than 10% cash in recent years. My staff struggles with counting the drawer, making change in safe and has a general lack of care when it comes to cash making accounting difficult. (crazy I know!)  We are considering going cashless for streamlining since we are at about 92% credit cards anyways.   I'm worried about the random customers who is upset that don't take cash or doesn't have a card, although, we do take cash app through Square. Thoughts? Anyone gone cashless and regretted it in coffee shop and/or retail setting?

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @BigRiccs.  We did it at the beginning of the pandemic and lockdowns, and instantly regretted it.  Even though no one knew for certain that the virus could or could not be passed around on bills, some people just didn’t care no matter what the consequences.  So we stopped that little experiment quickly.

We used to have a 50-50 split between cash and cards.  Since the pandemic it is more like 80-85% cards.  Even with that, we would never consider being cashless mostly because it would exclude the entire portion of American society that is “unbanked.”  We are an ice cream shop (similar business model to yours).  Our customer mix is all over the map — from people who have more money than anyone should have to people who come here for their weekly family/date night.  These days we take pride in telling folks that we will accept payment however they want to give it because they are spending money with us and we want to make that easy for them to do!  That always goes over well, trust me.

As for your employee issues, I’ve had those.  But I’m the kind of person who will not hesitate to teach employees proper cash handling procedures and then expect them to be followed, or else.  You can guess what the “or else” is.  If someone can’t do basic money handling then they are in the wrong business as far as I’m concerned and they need to find work more suitable to their skill set.  These days, my teen Gen-Z employees do just fine after a little training and reinforcing.  My drawer is always spot on so it’s just not a worry for me.

But that’s just my experience.  I wish you well in your decision.  If you do decide to go cashless, though, be prepared for some blowback — on Yelp, Google, etc.  In my experience, customers prefer choices and, like I said earlier, going cashless will exclude people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale who can’t (or don’t want to) have cards.  For me, getting that sort of reputation (fair or not) is just not worth the risk.

[maxpete]

@BigRiccs welcome to the Community! Great question 🙂 

Tagging a few sellers to hear their thoughts too

@phillipsrw, @lenjobakes, @AnnaB, and @Lovewell 

[phillipsrw]

@BigRiccs@maxpete The landscape is certainly different post pandemic when it comes to cashless operations. 

Our out of town store sees a lot more international tourists and so we see cash sales here probably as they prefer to have folding money to hand, picked up at the airport in case they have credit card issues while on holiday. 

The city location saw a different demographic of folk, perhaps more tech savvy, professionals, students etc those embracing new ways to pay, and to pay quicker. Also cashless when you operate a more remotely managed store means no trips to the bank etc. so advantages

But I would say we are seeing a shift to Card payments in general, but I think we are some way off to saying goodbye to cash.

[Candlestore]

@BigRiccs ;

In my state we are not leagally allowed or are leagally allowed to only take a Credit Card.  There is a law that was sent to court in Philadelphia about places not accepting cash.  Walmart, 10 mins down the road from my store tried it and got a quick backlash.  There also is one resturant near me that does not accept cash as a customer asked me if we do accept cash?  I said yes as far as I know in Pa businesses must accept cash since it is legal tender for all debts in the USA.  He said they were just at XYZ and they refused cash.

So I am not sure were this is legally now.  But you may want to check the laws for your area to see if you can and also if you want the backlash from customers reviews.

[Lovewell]

This is perfect because we were JUST chatting about this. 

first of all- we do take cash so feel free to disregard our opinion if it doesn’t resonate. 

Our 2 shops are in smaller towns and we take roughly 25% cash. That’s a much larger percentage so it just makes sense for us. 

Little note: all US paper currency has a fine print that says, “ this note is legal tender for all debts public or private.” 

So legally we aren’t sure if we could even go cashless. 

However, we have a coffee shop we follow that has been robbed 3 times in 10 days and have thus decided to go cashless. Much respect and totally understand. Not sure if this is forever or while they get to the bottom of what’s going on! 

Overall- you do what’s best for your business. 

We do focus on training our team well. Money can be difficult for some (especially those that are younger or this is their first job) Trying to get better an no blanket statements about generations 😅 but we still catch ourselves. 

our method when counting the drawer. 
We do- they watch. We do together. They do- we watch. Then they do on their own and have someone accessible if there is an SOS moment! 

As a general rule someone in leadership is counting the drawer and we have daily recaps (in the team app shout out!) and make notes on the drawer if it’s off and what we did to fix it. 

Hope that gave good insight! Being a business owner is weird sometimes 😬 

[Sam_400º]

I've been cashless since I started my business 8 years ago. 

There's been some who are rude - but that's the only issue I've ever had, I don't want their custom if they're rude to me or any staff. 

How busy it is tends to lead to how strictly I stick to my own rules, if someone wants to pay cash and has the right change (and is polite) then I'll do it if I can do their order straight away. 

For order tracking and customer notification all my ordering is online too, this is something I get a lot more issues from in some areas (food truck so I move about) so I'm looking forward to the day when I can do SMS alerts for non online orders too. 

[Tamyra_Paunchy]

We've gone cashless at farmer's markets. Every once in a while I'll tell someone I can take cash from them but I do not have change... but other than that we haven't missed it. I don't worry that there's $ coming in that we're not tracking. I don't worry that there are sales happening that are not being recorded... and I no longer worry about having to watch that the cash box isn't swiped off the table during events. It's less headache for us altogether and it's very rare that we lose a sale completely because of it. Usually when we tell people we don't take cash they ask if we can take card or tap to pay, then they use one of those options. I can't even recall a time when someone chose to walk away completely. Hope that helps!

[Lovewell]

Love this positive perspective!