Some businesses want cash, others only accept credit cards

Tyler Kotch‘s South Slope pizza shop, PIE.ZAA, doesn’t accept cash. He says the decision to be a credit-card-only business has made life easier for him and his employees.

Terri Fisher‘s two dive bars, the Root Bar and Town Pump Tavern, don’t accept credit cards. She says the decision to go cash-only has made life easier for her and her employees.

In both cases, the owners say some customers get frustrated at their limited payment options. But neither is rethinking those policies.

“People might get a little upset, but it doesn’t really cause you any problems,” Kotch says. “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. That’s the beauty of life. But ultimately they’ll say their piece, and then they put their card in the machine and we all move on.”

Kotch’s no cash policy, which he enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic when people were wary of handling paper money, is more in keeping with national trends. The number of cashless businesses more than doubled from early 2020 to early 2021, according to AARP. And a 2023 survey by Visa found more than half of small-business owners anticipated going to digital payments only in the next two years.

No one keeps track of how many local businesses don’t accept cash, though anecdotally the number seems to be increasing, with newer South Slope businesses like TRVE Brewing Co. and music venue Eulogy being credit only.

U.S. currency contains the words “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” But there is no federal law requiring a business or anyone else to accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services, according to the Federal Reserve Board.

Last year, state Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus County, introduced the “Cash Commitment Act,” which would have required all North Carolina retail businesses to accept cash. “While this new trend might work well for the more financially privileged or up-to-date, it absolutely discriminates against whole portions of North Carolina citizens who have not embraced or do not have access to credit cards or banks in general,” he told WCNC in 2023.

The bill passed the House but died in the Senate. That means businesses in the state have no legal barriers preventing them from refusing cash.

But some consumers don’t like the way things are heading. Among issues, they cite less privacy, more exposure to hacking and increased economic inequality as downsides to credit card reliance.

As one Reddit user posted in response to an inquiry from Xpress: “I do not support cashless businesses. Cash is king.”

Keeping better track

When Kotch first opened his late-night pizza shop on Millard Avenue in 2020, he accepted cash payments along with credit cards. But within six months, he went to credit only, partially because of health concerns about handling money during the pandemic. But just as important, he says, he found electronic payments provided a more efficient way of accounting.

“I was getting a discrepancy every single night with my cash count,” he explains. “I just didn’t know where the money was going, whether it was getting lost in counting, if it was getting lost when it goes to the bank, if it was getting lost when an employee was counting it.”

Discrepancies could run to as much as $100 a day, he says, a problem that has been eliminated by relying on a digital point-of-sale system that enables him to keep track of revenue, inventory, customers and more. He estimates eliminating cash shortfalls saves him as much as $30,000 a year, more than making up for credit card processing fees he has to pay.

“People don’t understand it’s not just fees that come to the customer,” he says. “The restaurants are getting dinged with those fees as well. But it’s worth it to be able to track it and know where all that money’s going.”

Additionally, he says, the lack of cash makes PIE.ZAA, which stays open until 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, a less tempting target for robbers.

“If people started realizing that you have that much money sitting around, especially with all the homeless people jumping up in Asheville, they’ll come in and take it from you,” he says.  “Our employees, they don’t get paid to deal with that kind of stuff. My employees just need to focus on the task at hand, whether that’s making pizza or giving great customer service.”

When customers complain, it’s because they don’t understand his rationale for refusing cash, he says. And almost everyone has a credit card or debit card, so the complaints don’t result in lost business.

Cash on hand?

Flavio Hees and his family had one question as they arrived at the distinctive red bus that houses Double D’s Coffee & Desserts on Biltmore Avenue on a recent afternoon: Do we have any cash?

Fortunately, the family that had stopped in Asheville for the day as part of a two-week trip from Quebec had enough to pay for three coffees, but that’s not always the case.

“I would prefer they accept credit because not every time I’m out do we have cash,” he says. “Normally, we don’t have much with us. Sometimes it is a problem [if a business doesn’t accept credit or debit cards.]”

Missy Norris of Gatlinburg, Tenn., who was in town for a Rotary Club meeting, similarly prefers to use credit cards, particularly because it makes it easier for her to keep track of business expenses when she’s traveling. Paying with cash requires getting a paper receipt and keeping up with it.

“I usually travel with very little cash,” she says.

Fisher’s two bars, Asheville’s Root Bar and Black Mountain’s Town Pump Tavern, sometimes get complaints from customers about their cash-only policy, but they tend to come from regulars rather than tourists passing through town.

“At the neighborhood bar, everyone knows everyone, and they’re just happy to yell at me when they see me walking through,” she says with a laugh. But she says most customers are fine with the policy, in part because both bars have ATMs. Because Fisher owns the machines, she sets the fee, and she says she tries to keep it reasonable.

After years of a $2 fee per transaction, she raised the fee to $2.50.

Fisher doesn’t recall exactly when she went to cash only, but it has been well over a decade in both cases. She first made the decision because customers would often get confused by their credit card bills and mistakenly complain they had been charged twice.

“I remember being very frustrated when other people were frustrated with me about the credit card process,” she says. “I didn’t like that I was having to explain all this to people the next day [who were] upset, and it just got to a point where, hey, if everyone’s getting cash, we have a lot less problems.”

In the past, it was not unusual for customers who were running a tab to forget to close out and get their credit cards back on the way out.

“On a really, really busy night, you might have three or four cards left over,” Fisher says. “Or somehow, accidentally, somebody gets the wrong card back. It’s human error, but these are things I don’t have to deal with now.”

Fisher’s employees, especially the bartenders, love the cash-only policy. Some have told her they work at her bar because of it.

“A lot of employers in the service industry end up pooling all the tips from credit cards, and they end up having to make that employee come back for that money a different day. We don’t have any of those things because they can settle out their cash at the end of the night every night.”

She says her bars have been robbed, but she doesn’t think that was a result of the cash-only policy. “A lot of other bars have gotten robbed too. It’s just an occupational hazard.”

Cash preferred

Unlike Kotch and Fisher, Devin Walsh accepts both cash and credit cards at BattleCat Beverly Hills, the Tunnel Road coffee shop he opened in June with Amber Arthur, owner of the original BattleCat Coffee in West Asheville (which accepts cash and credit). But he tries to incentivize customers to use cash by adding a 7% surcharge to credit card payments.

“It’s definitely at least in part self-interest,” he says. “Square is a wonderfully convenient point-of sale system, but they do charge 3.5%, plus 10 cents for every swipe of the card, so it’s not inexpensive. And we try to keep our prices low.”

Some of the money from the 7% surcharge goes to paying those fees to Square, but Walsh is putting the rest of it away to give to teachers at nearby Haw Creek Elementary School. His goal is to accumulate $8,000 by next school year so that he can give the school $200 for each of its 40 classrooms. 

The coffee shop has a sign at checkout letting people know about the surcharge and how the money will be used.

“I feel like it’s a little bit more palatable to charge for the merchant fees if there’s also a charitable aspect to it,” he explains. “A public school teacher spends about $200 out of their own pocket to equip that classroom over the course of the year, and I have long felt that it’s just shameful that this is the situation. It’s crazy that this isn’t being handled by taxpayers and by governing bodies and taxing bodies.” 

Walsh plans to implement the surcharge at his other business, Fairview’s Daymoon Coffeebar & Books, in October. That money will be earmarked for OnTrack Financial Education & Counseling, an Asheville nonprofit. 

So far, Walsh admits, the surcharge hasn’t discouraged credit card use.

“We’ve had at least one person mention that 7% is pretty steep,” he says. “But on the whole, seemingly no one has a problem with it, or if they do, they’re keeping it to themselves. This is a brand-new initiative, and I’m not married to it being 7% for the foreseeable future. But I want to give it a chance and see how it feels.”