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Yes. There is a huge divide between online and offline. For online your choice is to poney up the fee or not get paid at all. You’ll also probably target a wid

Yes. There is a huge divide between online and offline. For online your choice is to poney up the fee or not get paid at all. You’ll also probably target a wider audience and region restricted payment networks become less viable. Offline credit cards processing currently has super low fees, but it’s also a field where there is already way more competition than VISA/Mastercard, in particular there will be national card networks, and prepaid NFC that rise up as an alternative. > Restaurants can't conceivably introduce a non-traditional payment network as their exclusive provider. In my experience they do. They always have cash as the fallback, so they can pick and choose more freely than other businesses (think of all the restaurants that won’t accept anything other than cash)

philip1209 4y ago
Yeah, but the danger is that cash-only businesses will have smaller check sizes, and at the end of the day that probably translates to less in alcohol sales. So, if sales decreases because of unfavorable payment methods (such as cash), then it's the high-margin item (alcohol) that probably gets affected most.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  If we’re pondering about how to run a restaurant, I think that’s a complicated and nuanced discussion that will have different ins and out depending on what restaurant, where, serving who. For instance a lot of lunch focused restaurants won’t serve much alcohol if at all. High volume low check size restaurants also abound. Do we also call cafes “restaurant” if they serve hot food at the table ? etc. A tourism oriented restaurant will go so far as to accept American Express and swallow the fees, while a local restaurant can refuse anything other than cash and the local prepaid card, it really varies a lot. PS: we might be missing context on if we’re only taking USA, as the article is about that, or on more global range, which I think is more interesting on the Visa/Mastercad discussion.

philip1209 4y ago

Yeah, but the danger is that cash-only businesses will have smaller check sizes, and at the end of the day that probably translates to less in alcohol sales. So, if sales decreases because of unfavorable payment methods (such as cash), then it's the high-margin item (alcohol) that probably gets affected most.

makeitdouble 4y ago
If we’re pondering about how to run a restaurant, I think that’s a complicated and nuanced discussion that will have different ins and out depending on what restaurant, where, serving who. For instance a lot of lunch focused restaurants won’t serve much alcohol if at all. High volume low check size restaurants also abound. Do we also call cafes “restaurant” if they serve hot food at the table ? etc. A tourism oriented restaurant will go so far as to accept American Express and swallow the fees, while a local restaurant can refuse anything other than cash and the local prepaid card, it really varies a lot. PS: we might be missing context on if we’re only taking USA, as the article is about that, or on more global range, which I think is more interesting on the Visa/Mastercad discussion.