Page 12 - Food Service Magazine March 2019

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PAYMENT
GOING CASHLESS
A GROWING NUMBER OF CAFES AND RESTAURANTS ARE DITCHING SPARE CHANGE FOR CARD PAYMENTS ONLY. CHATTING TO ALEKSANDRA BLISZCZYK, CO-OWNER AND CHEF AT MELBOURNE'S LUNE CROISSANTERIE KATE REID, CO-OWNER OF SYDNEY'S FISHBOWL CHAIN NIC PESTALOZZI, AND SAM CANNING OF CANNING'S FREE RANGE BUTCHERS THROW IN THEIR TWO CENTS.
8:50am: a $4 coffee is ordered, and a fistful of silver is turned onto the
counter. “That's one, two, two- fifty, two-seventy,” the customer says, while the line grows longer and more impatient.
It's a familiar scenario, whether it's cash for a coffee, cocktail or dinner. But with
card payments on the rise, an increasing number of foodservice businesses are moving from analog to digital and ditching cash altogether.
In 2017 the Reserve Bank
of Australia revealed that consumers are continuing to preference hard plastic, with the number of credit and EFTPOS transactions doubling between 2007 and 2016, from 26 per cent to 52 per cent of all consumer payments. Cash is still the most accessible form of payment, but the number of people leaving their homes with nothing
but cash in their pockets is dwindling.
According to a report
by the Australian Retailers Association in March 2018, tap-and-go payments make up more than two thirds of all card transactions in Australia. It's
clear people want to speed up the caffeinating process. Before tap-and-go was introduced, selecting your account and punching in your pin might have taken just as long as dolling out coins, but now, with nothing but a tap required, the time difference between cash and card is a major factor in deciding to go cashless.
Kate Reid's Lune Croissanterie in Melbourne has famously commanded queues during its every opening hour, even before it captured global attention when New York Times writer Oliver Strand hailed Reid's croissant the best in the world. Now the team sells between 18,000 and 20,000 croissants at its two Melbourne shops each week.
When the second Lune opened last year in Melbourne's CBD, making both venues cash- free was a no-brainer.
Reid calculated that 90 per cent of Lune's transactions
were already done on card, and reasoned that the 10 per cent
of customers who pay by cash would still have a card on them, whether they're a student, a working professional or a tourist.
So Lune Fitzroy emptied its tills and Lune CBD opened its door with no cash on the premises from day dot.
But communication is key. Hanging next to the counter is the cafe's menu, the last line of which reads “card payment only”, so customers are ready before they order.
“Having the option of ways to pay, counting change, opening the till draw – even those little things were slowing the queue down, and if there's only one way to pay, you already know that before you get to the front of the queue, you just pull it out and tap your card. It's actually really sped up our queue,” she says.