[ad_1]
Sweetgreen, a trendy salad chain that helped launch the cashless revolution, is backtracking.
On Thursday, Sweetgreen announced plans to accept cash at all US sites by the end of 2019.
The change comes three years after Sweetgreen announced that it would only accept payments via an app or card.
Going without money "started with a requirement that we always had at Sweetgreen: how to simplify things?" Sweetgreen co-founder Jonathan Neman told Business Insider at the time.
Neman said in 2016 that Sweetgreen used cash to speed up service, protect against theft and promote sustainability.
"Going without money has had these positive results, but this has also had the unexpected consequence of excluding those who prefer to pay or can only pay in cash," said Sweetgreen in an article in Thursday in Medium.
Sweetgreen is not the only company to go back on its spending reduction plans. Earlier in April, news was announced that Amazon plans to start accepting cash at its Amazon Go cashless stores.
Read more: Amazon plans to accept money from Amazon Go stores after accusations of "discrimination and elitism" and new laws banning cashless stores
Restaurants and cashless stores have been hit by the effects of excluding millions of people who do not have a bank account. In the United States, 8.4 million households, or about 6.5 percent of all households, were "unbanked" in 2017, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Cities and states have recently been working on the adoption of a regulation banning cashless companies. Massachusetts, New Jersey and Philadelphia are already demanding stores that they accept cash payments, and New York and San Francisco are considering similar measures.
[ad_2]
Source link