A PRICE TO PAY
Going cash-free would make life harder for everyone in New York
YOU want to pay in cash? No class! Take your filthy, germ-laden $10 bill and spend it where they’ll serve a pathetic, nocredit loser like yourself.
Customers who pay with physical currency at a swelling number of “fast casual” food chains are as welcome as mouse-hunting health inspectors. In the name of employee safety, “streamlined” service and protecting the masses from bill- and coinborne bacteria, many franchises are switching to no-cash payment systems.
Among those that now take only credit card or app payments: Dig Inn, Sweetgreen, Bluestone Lane Coffee and Two Forks at Dos Toros. Danny Meyer tried it at one of his new Shake Shacks earlier this year but had the good sense to drop it after customers hated it.
The City Council now wants to require “fast casual” food spots to accept cash. I never dreamed I’d side with anything proposed by the council, a body so loony-left “progressive” that it makes Mayor de Blasio look like a Rockefeller Republican by comparison. But the swing toward cash-free cafes stinks like dayold salad-bar fish.
Yes, free enterprise is sometimes discriminatory and exclusionary. But while it’s one thing for those at any income level not to have enough dough to buy certain products, it’s quite another to deny the products to those who can afford them — which is exactly what nocash cafes do.
The bill’s sponsor, Bronx Councilmember Ritchie Torres, told Grub Street that “insidious racism” underlies the no-cash policy and “disempowers communities of color.” He argues that it’s a way to keep poor, mostly black and Hispanic customers out of stores whose health- and nutrition-focused marketing draws lots of affluent young whites. He didn’t mention that it also chases away elderly citizens of every color who don’t use digital devices and prefer not to draw down a line of credit to buy a $2.50 cup of coffee.
The chains more likely are just trying to save money by employing fewer workers. With digital checkout, who needs cashiers? Yet lawabiding, tax-paying New Yorkers without credit cards, debit cards or iPhones — and there are lots of them — might be forgiven for thinking Torres is right.
The cash-free cafes subscribe to all the politically correct, “woke” causes — saving the earth, enfranchising the community and compensating Third World coffee and fruit growers with “fair trade” deals. But their hypocrisy when it comes to First World customers sets off worse heartburn than caffeine poisoning.
Sweetgreen aims to “inspire healthier communities by connecting people to real food,” according to its cringe-worthy “mission statement.” But its no-cash policy will surely keep lots of lower-income New Yorkers from enjoying its $12.50 guacamole greens salad and $12.75 curry chickpea bowls. Let them go somewhere else and get fat on burgers and salt-drenched fried chicken!
Dig Inn, which blares its commitment to local ingredients, says going mostly cash-free allows their “teams . . . [to] devote their time and energy to serving guests and cooking great food.” Sure, and the reason some hotels won’t replace wet, filthy towels unless you throw them on the floor is to save the environment — nothing to do with saving on laundry!
Enthusiasts for human-free “hospitality” say it’s the wave not only of the future but increasingly of the present. Guests at the Public Hotel on Chrystie Street check in through an iPad without ever facing a reception clerk.
They point out that business in the entire happy nation of Sweden has gone 99 percent cashless. Why can’t we? But Sweden, with a population barely larger than that of New York’s metropolitan area that’s overwhelmingly homogenous despite recent immigration, is no model for uniquely, gloriously polyglot New York.
There’s a more mundane reason to hate digital checkouts, too. The damn things don’t work half the time — experienced by anyone who’s been stuck behind a customer unable to pay for a $5 skim caramel macchiato at Starbucks. Their credit-card chip can’t be read (as my own often isn’t). Their app doesn’t work either, prompting a prolonged yakfest with a manager. Or the store’s own computer crashes while customers seethe.
My friend waited on line for a half hour at the new, no-cash Van Leeuwen ice-cream place on Amsterdam Avenue. When she finally got to the counter, their computer was down. She left and has no immediate plan to go back.
It would be easier and faster if they took Bitcoins — or used an abacus. And nobody would feel left out.