Yesterday I had a similar experience with a cafe in a smallish town (Malvern, PA). However, instead of using an app system, they relied on the "honor system". I would be curious as to their annual losses, and how that would vary when in a metropolitan area such as SF.
That's cool, but that would be a hassle for groceries if you had to manually add up all your purchases. The app allows you to combine security with customer convenience.
We have a trust-based beverage PoS at our hackerspace. The bottle crates are just standing there and everyone is trusted to pay into the cash desk next to the crates when they take bottles out. Our weekly losses (i.e. bottles and money not accounted for) average ~40€, with weekly revenue around 200-300€. The losses are factored into the prices. Prices are comparable to or slightly below convenience store levels.
Is there a mechanism for IoUs / credit lines for members?
I've seen trust-based mate shops at hackerspaces around the world, and I've been told that the ones that have a credit system (even one that's not limited, checked, and that's not even authenticated) end up actually not having any significant losses. Like, anything from a piece of paper with people noting down unpaid mate purchases to things like android tablets with a webapp letting you note that you put in a bill of N euros and taken out a bottle of mate.
Friction from being able to pay right away seems to lead to "I'll pay extra later" thinking, which makes people either forget or miscalculate how much they actually owe.
Yes, each member account has a balance without any restrictions in either direction, and it mostly works fine. At times, the negative balances pile up, in which case I write a mail to the mailing list asking people to pay their dues. Usually, the negative balances approximately cancel out the positive balances, both at something like 1000 euros.
Also, when your balance is negative, after every purchase there is a big red notification reminding you of that.
> and how that would vary when in a metropolitan area such as SF.
I've spoken with grocery store clerks in SF (at major chains like Walgreens) who were concerned that their stores might be closed because of truly excessive losses due to constant shoplifting. Of course the shrinkage is factored into the price, but you can only raise prices so much before it starts eating into your sales.
BTW, when I visited the Amazon Go in SF it actually seemed to have more staff present than a regular grocery store of comparable size.
CCTV seems like a bad move. It creates an adversarial relationship to the customers. For a small business, it would be better to cultivate goodwill and rely on community norms to police offenders.
People aren't likely to repeatedly steal from an honours system cafe if there are regular customers witnessing them.
That no longer falls under the purview of the small, independent cafe on the honours system.
I'd say, in a cafe, besides cash you could have a touchscreen to key in your order and tap your phone to pay. The walk in walk out Amazon model is not an honours system, it's a technological policing model.
