Dive Brief:
- Sweetgreen, the fast-casual restaurant chain, plans to go cashless in all its eateries in 2017, reports Fast Company.
- The chain, which has 64 restaurants, told Fast Company that it successfully tested the idea and plans to go forward with it in the new year. A primary reasoning behind the shift is that it will give managers more time to mentor and train staff, per the report.
- Cofounders Jonathan Neman and Nicolas Jammet also told Fast Company that going cashless reduces the likelihood of employees being robbed for cash, eliminates the expense of transporting cash in armored cars, reduces the spread of bacteria through money-handling and speeds up transactions.
Dive Insight:
Sweetgreen co-founders’ might give other employers incentive to go cashless. Knowing that employees’ safety, along with hygiene and productivity concerns, were the top reasons for going cashless is heartening.
The company should serve as a model for employee-friendly workplaces. Eliminating cash would make full use of technology already available on most smartphones with much less disruption in the short term than implementing automated checkouts. Other employers might want to follow suit to improve their hiring and promoting efforts, engage staff and raise productivity.