• by Thom Forbes , July 13, 2017

Visa has launched a new initiative to make Hamiltons and pennies as quaint as the gold standard. Up to 50 small business restaurants, cafés or food truck owners can win $10,000 in The Visa Cashless Challenge by describing what going 100% cashless “means for them, their employees and customers.”

“Despite the proliferation of credit and debt cards, and the advent of technologies like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, cash remains a significant method of payment in many industries across the U.S. and around the world. Going completely cashless often requires upgrades to current point-of-sale systems, which remains an impediment for many small businesses, which is largely where cash remains king,” writes the AP’s Ken Sweet for USA Today.

“We are declaring war on cash,” Visa spokesman Andy Gerlt tells Sweet, who reports that Visa expects to expand the program to other industries, and possibly countries, over time. 

“Cards have made a dent in cash in the U.S., but cash remains the most widely used payment form among Americans, accounting for 32% of all consumer transactions in 2015, compared with 27% for debit cards and 21% for credit cards, according to a November report by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco,” AnnaMaria Andriotis reports for the Wall Street Journal.

But Andriotis also talks to Michael Ryan, the co-founder of New York City-based 2nd City, a Filipino taqueria that hasn’t accepted cash since it opened last year. “By not having to count cash, visit a bank or order change, Mr. Ryan estimates, the manager on duty saves about 23 hours a week,” she writes.

“A report coming out later this year called ‘Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments’ will document a study that found that if all local businesses in 100 major metropolitan cities transitioned from using paper cash to digital means only, their cities stand to experience net benefits of $312 billion per year,” according to a post titled “Visa: This Is A Game Changer” on Seeking Alpha by Quad 7 Capital. “…These benefits come from faster customer processing and less time spent counting actual paper money.”

Visa’s campaign to turn us into a cashless society cuts against the engrained culture at most small businesses, Erin Douglas points out in the Denver Post.

“For years, mom-and-pop shops and food trucks alike have shuddered at the expense of credit card transactions. It’s not uncommon, for example, for small businesses to have minimum dollar amounts for card purchases. Some still don’t accept them at all or gently inform customers they prefer cash,” Douglas writes.

“The good thing about cash is that there’s no merchant fee,” Jimmy Fixari, owner of Turn In BBQ, a food truck with a $5 credit card minimum, tells Douglas. “If we could do anything, we would do cardless, but we try to be as flexible as we can.”

(Not to mention that there’s no record for the IRS to look at either, which he decidedly didn’t.)

“At the end of the month, when you look at a credit card statement and see how much you paid, it's a real number that hits you right in the face,” Matthew Geller, president of the National Food Truck Association, tells Reuters in a piece published by Fox Business. “Many food trucks accept credit cards to be competitive, but would rather have cash.” 

There may be other competitors to both cash and Visa at the taco truck down the road, of course.

“One way that these cashless restaurants could avoid both interchange fees and dealing with crumpled bills would be to accept blockchain currencies like bitcoin, assuming that interested customers have devices with bitcoin wallets in their pockets,” suggests Laura Northrup for Consumerist. “Visa, however, is not going to help them set up for this. As far as we know, the payment network doesn’t have any cryptocurrency payment acceptance products in the works.”

Meanwhile, Visa is also hitching a ride on formula E — for electronic vehicles — racing, which is coming to Brooklyn this weekend. 

WKBW, the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y., was among the local stations that interviewed Formula E race car driver Nelson Piquet, Jr. and Visa’s Jack Forestell yesterday. Rhode Island’s WPRI was another.

“What do race cars have to do with the way we pay for things?” asks WKBW’s Lanora Ziobrowski in a promo for the video of the piece. “The first-ever formula E race is coming to the U.S. this week. Visa is putting a stake in the ground and leading the charge toward a cashless culture in the U.S. and the setting will be electric race cars speeding through New York City Streets!”

Which apparently are running much more efficiently than mass transit in NYC.