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Commerce, a restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village, last week began accepting only credit and debit cards for payment, a move the owner hopes will get the restaurant lower card-processing rates. "If a merchant like myself is all cards, I should get a better rate," Tony Zazula tells CardLine sister publication ISO&Agent Weekly. The restaurant switched to all cards on Wednesday. Currently, Commerce's discount rate for all cards other than American Express is 2%, Zazula says. The AmEx rate is 2.9%. Zazula says Brentwood, Tenn.-based Comdata Corp. is his processor. On average, the per-person sale is $60 at Commerce. Securing a lower rate, however, is not the primary reason the restaurant dropped cash as a payment method, and Zazula does not expect to get one. "Because so little of our business is done in cash, it seems burdensome to have two systems," Zazula says. About 10% of Commerce's patrons pay with cash, he says. Cash involves more labor and creates concerns about security and theft, and reducing such concerns was more important than using the only-cards policy to negotiate better processing rates, Zazula says. "I didn't take that route because I thought it was a fruitless endeavor," he says. Zazula is not concerned about losing customers because of the new policy. "It is far more inconvenient to pay with a card and [the merchant] tells you they only accept cash," he says. Zazula says he was inspired to drop cash after a series of flights this summer on airlines that only accept payment cards in passenger cabins.
