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In many other countries you don't let your credit card/debit card out of your sight. When I was in Canada for PyCon the wait staff would come back the credit card machine, and I'd pay right there and then. My credit card never leaves my hands.

This is more secure against skimming too, and allows Chip & Pin to be easily used.

In my experience here in Australia and recently traveling around Europe, the US is the only country that hasn't seemed to get mobile terminal/contactless. It's like they missed the last 5 years completely.

In some countries when you ask for the check, the waiter comes back with a card reader and you pay immediately (leave tip on the table if applicable, only "two trips"). Apple Pay or similar still make the experience shorter and more secure.

Plenty of places here in Germany don't even take cards, only cash.

A lot of restaurants run a very thin profit margin, around 7%: 33% food cost, 33% labor cost, 30% overhead, and 7% profit. This doesn't account for the ridiculousness that is open table and urban spoon. Often the owner has a salary position which is included in the labor cost. One place where profit can be increased is not throwing out food and portion control. The other way to increase profit is being paid cash. Nobody uses cash anymore. A 2% to 3% fee on all credit card transactions eats into that 7% profit, a lot. If Apple can make it profitable to charge 1% transaction fee or a per transaction fee like ATM transactions, they will do very well in the restaurant industry. Moreover, if their app integrated into the POS system and is used widely, they can step on opentable's toes offering discounts and reservations. I know one chef who instead of opening a 40 seat or 120 seat restaurant, opened a 23 seat restaurant and didn't accept credit cards, cash only. He always had a line out the door and made a lot more money than his previous position as an executive chef at a hotel in Beverly Hills. I would love to have a developer's license to the NCR Aloha POS SDK.

LevelUp helps small businesses aggregate credit card transactions to decrease the fees (https://www.thelevelup.com/). I'm not affiliated with them. It's a nice service that seems to be most prevalent in Boston.

My friend developed an online ordering app for busy bars called SpeedeTab.[1] Being able to order a drink and pay at the same time from a phone is very nice. When the drink is ready the phone gets a push notification. The bartender verifies the transaction number of the phone. Because they are doing credit card transactions in bulk they got a very decent discount and they passed that onto the bars and coffee shops like you mentioned with LevelUp. For restaurants, getting the transaction fees at around 1% is a big deal because that is a lot of the net profit. I haven't heard about LevelUp yet, lot has changed in the past 10 years, and I'm out of the loop now.

[1] http://www.speedetab.com/

Wait...

33% food cost

33% labor cost

30% overhead

07% profit

_______________

103%

Er... wat?

I forgot to math and oopsied a 3. Here is an example breakdown of prime costs for a restaurant. Prime cost doesn't include non variable overhead like rent, insurance, and utilities.[1]I don't think my lack of math skills takes away from my argument that if Apple Pay can reduce payment transaction fees to 1% of the charge, it will have a major increase in net profits for small and medium restaurateurs.

[1] http://www.restaurantowner.com/public/images/212b.png

This is a minor inconvenience and also has the benefit of giving time to patrons to relax and chat while they finish up a meal.

As important as efficiency is, running your personal life on 100% efficiency is going to end up with people being bored as hell. Let's take out one click, remove any effort for a human being. Would we all be happy if we literally sat in the same corner and never did anything? That's 100% efficiency, you don't even have to order your groceries because they are automatically shipped to you!

There is a balance that is heavily, heavily overlooked in automation. Not to mention, removing 2 steps from paying at a restaurant is just...completely unimportant. What a waste of everyone's time, money, and talents.

You can always sit and wait after you get the check. This is inconvenience for some and zero value add for the rest.

If you were really concerned about not wasting people's time or talents, saving a busy professional 3 round trips would be helpful.

Or more realistically, it would result in fewer staff members for that restaurant.

It's not about efficiency at all.

I want to know that I can get up and leave whenever I want to. This makes me feel much more comfortable and relaxed.

  "also has the benefit of giving time to patrons to relax and chat while they finish up a meal."

I am confused about this. I rarely get the tab while I am still eating.

I feel that they have missed that train. [...] wishlist item is being able to pay at a restaurant with my phone [...]

I believe the latter part of what you said is why, contrary to the former part of your statement, their offering will never be irrelevant: They control a very large and, compared to the rest of the world, affluent part of the phone hardware and software market. The phone is the gateway...at least until simply using a thumbprint or iris scan on the vendor's own hardware becomes a thing. But that seems more creepy than using your own phone as a proxy/escrow service.

there is a huge difference in what they can bring to the table in vendor vs p2p plays.

p2p will presumingly work almost exactly like venmo, or more accurately, iMessage. Not only are they not bringing anything new to the table, they are also not leveraging anything from them controlling the hw+sw, other than being preinstalled.

A vendor play is much more interesting, since this is where they can really shine (completing a transaction without ever unlocking your phone or typing anything).

This was discussed last time we talked about payments, but Venmo is not ubiquitous. I live in the valley, am on the border between Gen X and Millennial, and I've never used Venmo in my life. Furthermore, until about 2 weeks ago, I had never MET anyone who had used Venmo (or at least talking about using it).

The friend in question is 21.

My experience has been similar.

The first time I ever even heard of Venmo was when my roommates were collecting the rent checks but were out of town - they are in their early 20s and, well, I'm not that young :)

Do others here use Square Cash? I much prefer payments to friends going directly from my bank account to their bank account. For all the alternatives I am familiar with (Venmo, PayPal), payments to me land in some intermediary account.

I feel either this distinction isn't important to many or that Square Cash is just widely unknown.

I've had a Square dongle since they came out and were free, but only used it a few times. I've used Square Cash perhaps a dozen times between friends. Most people seem to have it, but its use is still fairly uncommon. Part of it is that, at my age (mid-30s), typically there's no reason to send your friends money. It's handled for payments for, say, travel expenses.. but typically if it's just a meal, we either split the check the 'old' way or someone just picks up the tab.

I had a nice experience with what seemed to be a NCR product at a restaurant. They printed the check and brought it over. The check had a URL and a short code. With the URL and code you could pay your bill with your mobile, tip and everything. We were able to just get up and leave. Worked great.

There is a service like that, and they are partnered with several stores in the US - http://www.mycheck.io/

Even after you leave, after step 4 they still need to manually enter your tip amount.

forgot about that! I bet they just love doing that.