Making A Case Against Cash-Only Restaurants

If you’re a restaurant owner, you are undoubtedly a busy individual with a lot on your plate. Pun intended. Between ensuring that your meals are excellently prepared, the atmosphere of your establishment is clean, warm and welcoming and that the customer service provided is top-notch, you have a jam-packed schedule of tasks that must all be completed each day to keep your business running.

However, if you are a restaurant owner who has neglected to offer his/her customers the option of paying with credit card, there is a definite box on your to-do list that needs to be checked off immediately. Cash-only restaurants are not highly favoured by most of the general public. The vast majority of restaurant patrons much prefer the ability to pay at the table with either their credit cards or their debit cards.

New York Times critic, Sam Sifton is one such restaurant patron. In his 2010 review of the Brooklyn, New York-based Prime Meats restaurant, he states that there are only two problems with the establishment. The first problem is that it accepts no reservations which he claims can “wreak havoc” on visitors who have to travel far distances to eat at the restaurant. The second problem is that it doesn’t accept credit cards.

“This seems slightly ridiculous in 2010,” Sifton writes, “At a restaurant where a dinner for four might run a considerate host more than $400?…(If you) forget to line your pockets in the manner of a Biggie Smalls impersonator and you’re going to need to leave your guests before the end of it all, and walk to a bodega A.T.M. to rustle up enough cash to pay your bill. This is a grim feeling for a grown person to experience, right up there with walking around all day with a large knot of $20 bills in your pocket only because you’re going to dinner someplace that doesn’t take credit cards.”

Dave Infante of Thrillist.com agrees. In fact, he strongly believes that the cash-only restaurant “must die”. His review of such eateries is as scathing as it is wordy. “The cash-only restaurant is a clearing-house for a blushing, sputtering spectrum of middle-class ignominy,” articulates Infante, “It condescends to cardholders with faux moralism. It grins oleaginously as they fumble through wallets & punch grubby buttons on corner ATMs. It is an inconvenience at best and a vessel of fraud at worst. For these reasons and more, I say the cash-only restaurant must die.”

Infante writes that many restaurateurs who continue to keep their establishments cash-only do so because of the fear of processing fees, which he reveals are “single-digit percentages”. He notes that this is simply bad for business because people tend to spend more money when they’re able to pay with their credit cards. He notes that restaurants that remain cash-only are simply and blindly refusing to accept that consumers prefer non-cash payments.

“There are a bunch of other reasons a cash-only operation is a chaotic menace to good restauranting — security, general organization, et cetera,” he continues. And, at Canadian POS Corporation, we couldn’t agree more. We strongly believe that Canadian restaurateurs should get on board with doing away with the cash-only concepts for their businesses. It’s simply good for business!

For information on how Canadian POS Corporation can have your restaurant set up a new pay at table solution, give us a call at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.