Visa Wants to Pay Restaurants to Not Accept Cash
But you can pay with your smart watch!
Yesterday, we looked at card-swipe checkout apps that ask you to pay a $1.00 tip on your $1.25 donut:
Today, let’s look at Visa’s dream of a future in which we’ll always swipe our cards for donuts because cash payments will not be allowed:
Visa offers restaurants $10,000…if they stop accepting cash
If a restaurant opts in, it’ll get a $10,000 gift from Visa (V)to help pay for technology upgrades, the company said. Those tech upgrades could mean installing platforms that that accept payments from phones, smart watches or other devices.
If you visit the Visa Cashless Challenge website, you learn that they are specifically targeting “small-business restaurants” along with cafes and food trucks—the types of businesses that often add surcharges to credit card purchases under $5 to cover the cost of the processing fees—and they are serious about the NO CASH EVER, NOT EVEN IF THE CUSTOMER IS REALLY HUNGRY thing.
Which… um… sometimes you don’t have access to a credit or debit card, much less a smart watch, but you do have a dollar that could get you a donut at a cafe or a bottle of water at a food truck.
Unless that food truck is doing the Cashless Challenge.
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