Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Single screen

This is topic Single screen - credit card fees in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=003124

Posted by Doug Oldenkamp (Member # 8538) on 07-10-2018, 02:30 PM:

We are a small single screen theater (100 seats). Currently using Vantiv to process credit cards (built into our POS software). When I add in all the "other fees" from Vantiv (statement fee, maint fee, Compliance fee, etc.) our total credit card expense fee is over 6%. Has anyone tried using a standalone Square terminal for credit card processing? They advertise 2.75% total fee. Looking to hear from someone who has experience using Square. Or are there other alternatives to Vantiv out there? Thanks

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 07-10-2018, 03:26 PM:

My solution is to not take credit or debit cards at all. Cash only.

No fees, you're not waiting while someone tries four different cards in the machine to find one that isn't declined or so worn out that it will no longer read, and when someone gets change in his hand from his $20 bill he's quite likely to use it to buy popcorn instead of putting it back into his pocket.

Once you've started taking credit cards it would probably be difficult to stop since people would expect it, but since I've never taken cards that isn't an issue.

Perhaps something like "To make our movies as affordable as possible, we can no longer accept credit cards."

I know that some folks on this board will disagree with me and say that some people are more likely to buy stuff with their cards than with cash, but there are still those fees to pay for each transaction and the extra waiting around for transactions to be processed.

"Sorry folks, our machine is down tonight so we can't take your card." That would be fun on a Friday night of a big movie, too.

Here's my card for my ticket in. Here's my card for popcorn and drink. Here's my card for one more drink part way through the show.

Three or four transactions processed for a grand total spend of around $20? I'd rather see a $20 bill come in the door and give back change as needed.

I lose maybe two customers every year who say they're going to get money from the bank machine and then disappear instead. But that's still cheaper than paying another rake-off on my revenue.

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 07-10-2018, 03:56 PM:

Frank, no ill will, but it's 2018. Cards are significantly faster than cash transactions and I haven't experienced an interruption in years... heck, our system even works when the power is out.

You say you lose a couple customers a year that come in and don't come back, but you have no way of knowing how many just don't bother coming because they know you don't take cards and they don't want to bother going to go get cash before visiting.

I'd say a good 60% of our transactions are cards now. And especially with Moviepass... That's a good chunk of business now too... a few dozen minimum any given day.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 07-10-2018, 04:25 PM:

I think that not accepting cards as payment option is highly dependent on the local culture and habits. Those are also not set in stone an

For example, I couldn't imagine operating a cinema business in the Netherlands or Belgium and not accepting cards, whereas in Germany it would still pass muster for now.

Personally, I'd prefer to reduce my cash exposure and take a hit on the processing fees. Since more and more banks don't have any actual cash at hand anymore, robbers have started to target other "soft targets" that deal with quite some cash.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-10-2018, 05:20 PM:

Credit card transactions thru RTS take 2, maybe 3 seconds.

Maybe once a weekend do I have to type somebody's number in because the card won't read, but it's maybe one out of a hundred cards. By and large, I would much rather do card transactions than mess with change.

Bank deposits are easier too because there's not as much cash to worry about, and even though we do take checks, since we've started taking cards, even a busy weekend will see maybe one or two checks, if that.

We've never had an outage either, except one time when my whole computer crashed and we couldn't print tickets at all. We had to hand-tabulate everything for the whole weekend, so not being able to take cards was the least of the problems.

quote: Buck Wilson
You say you lose a couple customers a year that come in and don't come back, but you have no way of knowing how many just don't bother coming because they know you don't take cards

That's for sure. A lot of people are "cash poor" and might not come to the movies at all if they have to dig the cash out of their pocket.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-10-2018, 05:51 PM:

quote: Buck Wilson
Cards are significantly faster than cash transactions

There may be cases where this is actually true, but I always dread getting caught behind someone at the grocery store who feels the need to charge his purchase of a dozen eggs. I normally shop at one of the largest stores in the city, and their credit card processing time is significantly longer than it would take to count change.

This is almost as bad as being stuck behind the little old lady who writes a check for a quart of milk....

I have no experience with this on the merchant side, so maybe getting the right credit card machine would solve this.

Posted by Rusty Gordon (Member # 2210) on 07-10-2018, 06:21 PM:

Hi Doug. Rusty from Sensible Cinema Software here. The items you mentioned besides the transaction itself are fixed costs regardless of whether the merchant does $1000 or $1,000,000 per month. Because of low monthly volume these fixed costs make the percentage you pay markedly higher than for a merchant doing say $35-50K per month in card volume. Square may be a solution that brings down that cost because unlike an integrated solution you would not have to pay for a lot of compliance related costs. That said, you'd lose the integration with our POS, the ability to do gift, and the product support and free updates from Sensible Cinema, $349 per year which we currently provide Vantiv merchants at no cost. Sensible Cinema can board most any processor as well, not just Vantiv. The cost varies, but with Vantiv and Heartland we charge no fees. Hope this helps.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 07-10-2018, 06:48 PM:

A theatre with just 100 seats is even smaller than mine (153 seats) -- unless I'm missing something I don't see any reason why he would need any automation at all.

I hand every customer one of those "Admit One" roll tickets when they pay at the door; by tracking the start and end numbers I know how many people came to the show. I just use cash drawers here, no electronic tills, so I have to add stuff in my head when people buy concession items but that's not hard as long as the concession prices are even numbers. (Some people think I'm a mathematical genius because they order a dozen things and then I tell them how much is it immediately. They don't realize that I just keep a running total in my head as I put stuff on the counter for them.)

I know how much money I put into the drawers at the start of the night so at the end of the night I take that amount back out and what's left is the night's take. Subtract the ticket revenue and what's left is the concession revenue.

I made a spreadsheet that calculates all of that and the sales taxes for me so all I have to do is enter the ending ticket numbers and the total take for the night and the rest of the calculation is done for me. The nightly bookkeeping takes me about five minutes to do.

No hardware, software or button pushing required when serving customers.

I suppose the only other factor is that I don't have any employees so I don't have to worry about detecting someone robbing the till.

But it's an easy system and the only cost is the rolls of Admit One tickets.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-10-2018, 07:14 PM:

I did boxoffice reports by hand for the theatre where I worked when I was in college. It never struck me as being difficult or especially time-consuming for a single-screen house, although I suspect that it would get old fast for a multi-screen cinema. They did have a cash register at the concession stand, although I always suspected that it did more harm than good by slowing down the concession line. This was the kind of cash register where one needs to type in the price of each item. They should have had one with buttons for small/medium/large popcorn, small/medium/large candy, etc., which would have reduced the button-pressing to one press per item.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-10-2018, 08:00 PM:

Doug, you don't say whether you use any kind of a POS system but if you don't, then Square would definitely be a good option to try. The nice part is, if you don't like it you can always go back to your previous method.

If you DO use a system, then as Rusty mentioned you would lose your integration, which would definitely slow you down. At my day job our CC machine is separate from our POS machine, and I hate doing card transactions there. At the theater, it's all one system so it's easy and faster than cash.

As for a small screen not really needing all the automation.... it's all in what you get used to, I guess. Everything being quick, fast and neat is the big draw for me, plus I like computery stuff. Also, we do gift cards, which people love... and *I* love the amount of "outstanding" gift card money that's already in the bank.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 07-10-2018, 08:20 PM:

Studies have been done which show that people who use cards (either credit or debit) spend, on average, 10 to 20 percent more than people who use cash.

It's a good reason for individuals to pay for more things with cash but it's also a good reason for businesses to encourage customers to use cards.

In other words, when people don't see real money leaving their pockets, they tend to lose track of how much money they are actually spending... to the benefit of businesses that take cards and to the detriment of businesses that don't.

Credit card companies know this and use it to their advantage by encouraging businesses to take cards so that more customers can use them.

In theory, the extra money that businesses make by accepting cards... and, thereby, encouraging customers to spend more is supposed to make up for the fees that credit card companies charge.

Is this all true? I don't know for sure but I think there might be, at least, a grain of truth, there.

I guess the test would be to try to measure whether you make more money when you accept cards versus when you don't and try to see if you make enough extra money to cover the fees.

I suppose you could go through your own sales records to see, on average, how much people spend on cash transactions versus card transactions. Then you could do the math and see if the averages play out.

Posted by Dustin Grush (Member # 10438) on 07-10-2018, 08:45 PM:

I will agree that cards are almost a must. In our area it seems that most of the "cash only" businesses have gone out, or are going out of business. I'm not saying that was the only reason, it just seems that if a business is unwilling to take cards, they are also unwilling to change in other areas. What worked 10 years ago isn't working anymore.

Our per capitas have increased maybe 15% since taking cards, but what really surprises is the transaction amounts. Pre-card a $30 snack bar bill was a rarity. Now i routinely see $60 and $70 charges, sometimes multiples per night.

I think that if we want to secure the next generation of movie goers, we are going to have to accept their preferred form of payment.

And back to the original post, have you looked into your local bank for processing? Thats where we found the best rate.

Posted by Alexandre Pereira (Member # 9295) on 07-10-2018, 09:08 PM:

I use Square - works great. The percentage is not the issue but rather how much people will spend. Square is fast and efficient and never goes down.
Also use Boxsession as much as possible - sell tickets and concession together. People spend more because they do not have to take out the plastic or the cash twice.
I find that higher concession sales, in my case, always correlate with the increased use of debt or credit cards.

Posted by Bill Brandenstein (Member # 7758) on 07-10-2018, 11:09 PM:

My wife is a key leader in a non-profit organization, a booster club associated with our local high school. They got a Square reader and account for ticket sales and other income. It's served us just about flawlessly. Whether this is a good idea for a medium/small business or not is something I'm not qualified to say, plus there are the concerns voiced by Rusty above. For a small, one-screen theater, it might be the least fuss. Keep in mind we're NOT a business, DON'T have daily (or necessarily even weekly) income, their take is a reasonably modest fee for their services, and it met our need in a non-technical way. I'm told that iPay and Android Pay are also competitive for a small business.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 07-11-2018, 01:23 AM:

quote: Frank Cox
But it's an easy system and the only cost is the rolls of Admit One tickets.

You're lucky the "reverse accounting" method works in your case and while it works, why not keep it at it? But you only need to add a little extra level of complexity and stuff is starting to go haywire soon if you keep doing it that way.

Stuff would already become increasingly more difficult if you would start accepting cards for example. I cannot judge about the situation and "progress" on it in rural Canada, but I've seen a massive upsurge of card transactions around the globe. In some countries, cash transaction are down to like just 30% or so of the transactions and stuff is moving forward pretty fast. In those countries you would simply be losing a massive amount of clientele, because they show up at your place with a bunch of plastic or maybe even some mobile apps but no cash.

If you would ever add a second screen to your theater (maybe simply because you're forced to do so, to meet minimum runtime requirements of some studios), your method would probably fail or become a lot more difficult.

The same would happen if you would eventually implement reserved seating or simply on-line ticket sales for a particular show.

But it doesn't stop there. Many theatres have stuff like gift card programs, loyalty programs, the works... You don't do that because you love the accounting overhead that this stuff brings with it, but simply because it actually works to sell more stuff.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 07-11-2018, 04:03 AM:

Frank, that is beautiful old school -- and it did in fact work for half century and we all did quite nicely with it -- ah, the fun of the old box office statements -- but it has one big drawback (if you want to discount the research that says you lose customers and revenue by not giving patrons the convenience of using their plastic) and that is, YOU do that math in your head, YOU can figure out your net in your head, YOU and your BRAIN are the system. And what that means is, your system is in jeopardy anytime you get sick or have a family emergency or just want a feakin day off; whenever you are forced to put someone else at the helm, even for one day, your "system" goes with you.

The advantage of an automated system is that a particularly knowledgeable human is not essential for its smooth functioning; automation allows you to swap out humans with little or no impact on efficiency. You can pretty easily teach almost anyone how to push the buttons in half an hour; it would take much longer, if you could at all, teach someone to do what you do in your head.

Then there is just the simple factor of fighting the wave, which actually now has become a huge rip current of people simply not wanting to deal with cash. Without selling tickets online and having scanners read tickets the customer has print at home or has as a QR code on their smartphonee which the scanners read at the door, we would simply lose customers in droves.

But I can tell you it does have its downside; the big hit is efficiency. As popular as that technology has become, it can be a nightmare at the ticket-taker line when someone either can't find their printed ticket or their home 10 year old printer renders an unreadable barcode or they come up to the door and can't get to the right email on their phone with the QR code or worse, found it in line, but as they get up to the ticket taker the screen goes into "save energy" mode and the image goes 1/3rd brightness and the scanner won't read it. I must say, tearing a roll ticket was never a complicated process that you could teach a 10 yr old to do efficiently. You know how many times one of the kids at the door scanning tickets pushed the wrong button on a scanner (a cellphone with a couple dozen buttons on it) and had to come back into the boxoffice to have the thing rebooted and reauthorized)? We have even had the scanner WiFi go down during a show with 1000 people in line -- talk about a tech nightmare.

Then again, you can't go backward with new technology. I just bought a Honda Civic Sport. After carefully arranging about 30 CDs in the center console for our summer trip, much to my dismay I discovered that it has no CD player. I was told CDs are "old" technology and I needed to "get with" the modern times. Yah, but I happen to have a substantial CD library. Without trying to be impolite, the salesman basically said, "Tough, old man." Seems they just assume EVERYONE on the planet pays for smartphone service. Everyone who is silly enough to still own CD is expected to transfer hundreds of CDs to their iPhones or Smartphones -- THOSE devices the car sound system will play. In fact, it doesn't even have a 3.5mm input jack so your could hook up an outboard device to its sound system. So to enjoy the quite spectacular sound system Honda has put in this car, you are expected to have a cellphone subscription or have a subscription to SiriusXM radio; the only "free" music source available is FM radio. Ever drive across country and try to find classical music on the broadcast band? Point being, they are not marketing that motor car (how's THAT for an antiquated expression) to old farts like me...you know, old schoolers. To which I say, [fu]

Honda, and the car you drove in on.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 07-11-2018, 04:46 AM:

quote: Frank Angel
Then there is just the simple factor of fighting the wave, which actually now has become a huge rip current of people simply not wanting to deal with cash. Without selling tickets online and having scanners read tickets the customer has print at home or has as a QR code on their smartphonee which the scanners read at the door, we would simply lose customers in droves.

The simple solution for this is to send those people to a self-service kiosk, info stand or the box office, where they or somebody else can retrieve a copy of his/her booking and print it on a new ticket.

Fit your kiosk with a QR-code scanner so people can already test if their code works before joining the line.

There will still be individual problem cases and people giving you a hard time, but it will help in getting down your waiting times at the gates.

quote: Frank Angel
THOSE devices the car sound system will play. In fact, it doesn't even have a 3.5mm input jack so your could hook up an outboard device to its sound system. So to enjoy the quite spectacular sound system Honda has put in this car, you are expected to have a cellphone subscription or have a subscription to SiriusXM radio; the only "free" music source available is FM radio.

Software like iTunes still allows you to import your CDs. Those CDs can be put on your mobile phone or stuff like an iPod. Your car sure will support Bluetooth audio. I've been playing music in cars this way for at least 10 years now.

The CD is indeed a pretty inefficient medium and I never liked it for in-car use. Your library takes up half your car and if you have a CD changer, it's usually located somewhere in the trunk of your car. I switched to the rather unpopular mini-disc format as soon as it became available for in-car use. It was already a big room-saver.

Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 07-11-2018, 07:42 AM:

Car CD players are dead because most cars manufactured within the last five to seven years have USB ports tied into the audio system. Two cars ago I bought a 64gb SanDisk flash drive, which is about the size of my thumbnail. I transferred ALL of my iTunes library and about 50 CDs to it in AAC format and it's still only about 50% full. You plug it into the car's USB port, and provided the drive is formatted properly the audio system indexes the content. The sound quality is outstanding, and if you have a car audio system that supports voice commands you can push a button and literally tell it what music you want to hear, and it plays. I don't miss fumbling around with discs at all.

Posted by Bill Brandenstein (Member # 7758) on 07-11-2018, 10:15 AM:

I love CDs because it's still the best audio quality of all of the aforementioned formats, and being a musician, the stuff printed on the boxes actually matters to me. Plus a little of my professional work depends on CDs. Yep, I'm also a Luddite with no smart phone.

My 2004 Corolla looks like heck, but has over 260K on it. When it dies, that CD problem is also mine. Maybe more of us need to complain!

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 07-11-2018, 11:04 AM:

quote: Frank Angel
And what that means is, your system is in jeopardy anytime you get sick or have a family emergency or just want a feakin day off; whenever you are forced to put someone else at the helm, even for one day, your "system" goes with you.

If I wasn't here there wouldn't be any show. That was the situation when I had film, that's the situation today with digital.

I have personally run every movie that has ever played at the Melville Theatre since the day that I opened it, and I don't see that situation changing any time soon.

I used to have a staff person hired but that person did only concession sales and clean-up. And I haven't had a staff person for the past ten years or so, either.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 07-11-2018, 12:18 PM:

The civic club I'm in recently ran the beer tent at a 4th of July event. One of our volunteers had a credit card reading system set up through her phone. It was kind of a pain in the ass. It was not easy or fast to handle transactions and she was often having to key in a bunch of stuff on her phone. So that really slowed down traffic in one of the lines. We had another register that was strictly cash-only. Anyway, having at least some credit card capability made the difference on whether some people bought anything at our tent at all. Hopefully we'll have a much better credit card reading setup at the next event.

Credit card systems are increasingly necessary for movie theaters. And movie goers are getting pushed into using credit/debit cards more. If you're going to buy a ticket at a reserved seat theater you need to buy in advance online. Sometimes you have to show the card you used online at the theater to verify the purchase.

Some people just don't carry any cash on them at all, even for buying nickle and dime items such as a $4 can of beer. I hate to generalize, but the younger the adult is the more he's going to be using plastic to purchase. There's at least one or more liquor stores and other businesses in my town that have a $10 minimum order for credit card-based purchases. Some gas stations charge a few cents per gallon more when a credit card is used.

I'm not against credit card use, but credit cards are a financial slippery slope. And that's especially true when there is more than one spender living under the same roof. I use cash whenever possible. I don't carry balances on credit cards; they're paid in full each statement. I have an intense hatred for how they count interest (recompiled and compounded daily), so fuck those interest payments. I don't know how people with thousands or tens of thousands in credit card debt can keep from going insane. I'm not digging myself into that kind of hole if I can help it. One step is not running up the balance by all kinds of mindless "blow and go" purchasing.

***

Regarding the car stereos and CD players, a bunch of the USB memory sticks have capacities big enough to hold many albums of CD quality audio. I have my entire CD collection ripped in LPCM WAV quality to a couple different external hard drives. I can dub whatever albums I want for a road trip pretty quickly. The only downside is the car stereos don't know how to pay WAV files, MP3 or AAC files with gap-less playback. Some albums, such as Pink Floyd: The Wall might have to be made into just a few song files with no breaks so the transitions aren't botched.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 07-11-2018, 12:41 PM:

I actually have two credit cards (American Express and Mastercard) that are both "Cash Back"; they refund me a small percentage of every purchase that I make using those cards. I get a credit on my bill once a year. The percentage isn't large; just slightly over 1%, but anything is more than nothing.

So I use my credit cards to pay for everything that I can since paying cash would get me no refund at all.

By paying the bill every month when it arrives and using my credit cards to pay for the stuff that I would be buying anyway, it's more-or-less free money. Similar to the "patronage refund" that I get from the local Coop every year for my purchases at the grocery store and gas station.

But I still don't accept cards at my theatre. [Big Grin]

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 07-11-2018, 05:18 PM:

A small chime in on the the card acceptance thing:
Your conc sales will increase with card sales being the amount purchased has no limit.
Cards has tons of more buying power than straight cash since you can only spend what is in the wallet.
Plus, cards are actually more safer since no cash has to be carried and if using credit cards, no possible chance of hackers getting into your bank accounts.

Frank, do you have an ATM in your lobby to satisfy those who have no cash, but would like to attend your venue?

Came back from a two week vacation.
Left my debit card at home and used just my credit card.
Now, I get home and pay off the outstanding balance used on my credit card from my bank account. Plus, have an excellent credit history.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 07-11-2018, 06:05 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
I'm not against credit card use, but credit cards are a financial slippery slope. And that's especially true when there is more than one spender living under the same roof. I use cash whenever possible. I don't carry balances on credit cards; they're paid in full each statement. I have an intense hatred for how they count interest (recompiled and compounded daily), so fuck those interest payments. I don't know how people with thousands or tens of thousands in credit card debt can keep from going insane. I'm not digging myself into that kind of hole if I can help it. One step is not running up the balance by all kinds of mindless "blow and go" purchasing.

The answer here is a debit card hooked to a bank account that can't go below zero. [Wink]

But yes, people tend to spend more money when paying with any kind of "virtual" money, compared to cold hard cash. I guess it's still a thing, holding e.g. $500 worth of cash in your hand, compared to a simple "swipe" where those same $500 never physically passed hands.

But, I've got a pretty interesting Debit MasterCard now that I can put a daily limit on. I recently gotten the same type of card for a bunch of people working for me. In order to avoid mindless spending on the cards, I put a hard daily limit on it and it worked like a charm.

quote: Frank Cox
But I still don't accept cards at my theatre.

What would it take to effectively change your mind?

Posted by Jesse Crooks (Member # 9389) on 07-11-2018, 07:28 PM:

Square is great. I've configured a number of POS systems for our theaters and for other businesses over the years, and it is by far the easiest to set up and use. I hate our current POS software and have daydreamed about dumping them for Square, but the niche ticketing functions required for a theater make that impossible for us. Running one theater with a single screen, I'd be tempted.

My suggestion for integrating them would be to add a custom tender type to your current POS software so that you can track which transactions were processed through Square. That way the POS will tell you the correct amount of cash to expect at the end of the night, and you can run reports for the POS software and Square to make sure the value of credit card sales matches.

The simplest method to run cards with Square would be to enter custom values every time, as you would if you were using a card reader with an old manual cash register. To do it cheaply you could buy a refurbished iPod Touch or a cheap Android phone. Note that you will have to buy the a Square chip reader for every terminal, which cost $49.

If you wanted to, say use the current POS software for ticketing and Square for concession (assuming you have dedicated sales stations and don't have to sell tickets from concession), you'd want to get a tablet. That would allow you to set up a grid layout for your items instead of selecting items from an alphabetized list, which is all a phone/iPod could do. Square does let you track inventory as well.

Square even does payroll, although I haven't used that feature myself. We use a third-party payroll company that you clock in to online, and most of our staff uses the iPod we use for scanning online ticket sales to do so, so I imagine that having your staff clock in using the device you use for Square would work pretty well.

Posted by Carl Martin (Member # 1146) on 07-12-2018, 04:20 AM:

i can't say i hold too high an opinion of square. i have a side-hustle delivering cookies (the baked kind, nothing to do with web browsers). the company decided at one point to switch to square for payroll, which of course entailed that all the couriers agree to square's terms. i actually read through them, and among other possibly objectionable things, square required that we abide by NACHA's rules. as i understand it, these are the rules by which banks shuffle around money. and you have to be a bank to see what these rules are. that's right, even though we had no access to these rules, we had to agree to them! i pointed this out to the cookie company, expecting that i'd have to find another side gig. to my surprise, they decided not to go with square after all.

yay cookie company!

fuck square.

Posted by David Buckley (Member # 2600) on 07-12-2018, 07:05 PM:

Is paywave widely used in the US yet? Here in NZ, paywave transactions under $85 don't need a PIN, so with integrated POS and credit card terminal payment is almost instant, much faster than cash or card.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 07-12-2018, 07:26 PM:

Both Visa and MasterCard/Maestro rolled out NFC payments in the last few years over Europe. I guess that about 50% of all card payment terminals are NFC enabled, in some countries a bit more than in others.

If you've an NFC compatible mobile phone and your bank was sufficiently competent to publish an app using the interface you can also use your phone for NFC payments.

Quite recently, NFC payment interfaces have become available on stuff like coin-operated self-service coffee machines and other vending machines. Slowly entering the last bastion of cash...

Banks are dictating the limits on the NFC payments and some banks allow you to change the limits within certain ranges. If you go over the transaction limit, your PIN will still be asked or your transaction will simply be rejected.

Since most of my plastic has become NFC-enabled in some way, I decided to put them into an NFC-proof wallet.

There are documented cases were people just walked around with an NFC payment terminal hidden in a handbag and were able to make transactions with random people's debit and credit-cards just by walking by them...

Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 07-13-2018, 03:54 PM:

Hi Doug, we actually use Vantiv but due to the fact we're in Canada, it's not "integrated" into our POS terminals and so I'm not aware of any of these extra fees. We do rent "outboard" debit/credit terminals from them, but our internet is lightning fast out here and our terminals simply let us tender a "manual credit" which keeps all of our reporting happy. So as far as I know, we're at the "standard" rate for credit. When we decided to take plastic, we simply raised ticket prices as though everyone would be using it, and it's certainly going more and more that way.