WASHINGTON — Your greenbacks will be no good at Sweetgreen locations around D.C. later this spring, but can the salad chain pull off a cashless model without alienating customers?
“They have a demographic sweet spot, and that is millennials, particularly urban dwelling, young professional millennials,” Sam Oches, editor at fast food trade publication QSR, tells WTOP.
“This demographic is obviously very digital and very card-based, so if any chain can pull it off, I think Sweetgreen is going to be the one,” he said.
Americans as a whole are spending less hard cash and swiping more credit and debit cards, but doing away with cash transactions throughout the fast food industry is likely not going to happen soon.
“When we look at trends in D.C., and other markets like New York, Chicago and L.A., it’s easy to blow those out nationally and [think] ‘Oh, this is a trend that is going to take off.’ But there are a million restaurants in the United States and Sweetgreen is a drop in the bucket compared to that,” Oches said.
Sweetgreen was founded by three Georgetown students in 2007, though it recently moved its headquarter to Los Angeles to facilitate its nationwide expansion.
Business Insider reports Maryland, Virginia and D.C. locations will stop accepting cash in March. Its stores in New York, California, Illinois and Pennsylvania will as of Jan. 18.
Fast Company quotes Sweetgreen co-founder Jonathan Neman as saying about 40 percent of sales were cash when the first store opened, but it is closer to 10 to 15 percent now.
The motivation for going cash free is to speed up customer transactions and to simplify employee training.
Business Insider says Sweetgreen expects the move will reduce service time by 10 percent.
