Going Out To Eat In Houston? Don’t Bring Cash.

Going out to eat has different meanings for just about everyone. For some, it’s a mundane fact of life for a variety of reasons. For others, it’s a way to reconnect with friends and family that slots effortlessly into a busy schedule. For still others, it’s an event. When going out to eat in Houston, though, it’s an increasing fact of life that you’d better have some level of mobile payments capability on hand because they’re not going to take cash.

An increasing number of restaurants, from both locations of Peli Peli to Montrose’s Boheme are deciding to pull out of cash in favor of cashless alternatives. While the reasons vary—Boheme was concerned about crime, and Peli Peli was focused on the safety of its employees not just for crime, but also for spending long evenings counting cash—the end result is the same.

Though overall, cashless businesses are still comparatively rare in Houston, it does seem like the population of such businesses is starting to ramp up. It helps that Americans are increasingly eschewing cash in their own right in favor of credit and debit cards.

While Peli Peli’s co-founder Thomas Nguyen noted that such a plan has benefits, it also comes with downside. Nguyen points out that service has sped up considerably, but also notes that there’s a real potential to lose business. Whether it’s customers that operate on a cash-only basis out of necessity—they have no bank connection that has a card available—or out of choice, going cashless means those customers simply won’t be served, and that’s business lost.

It’s easy to see why Nguyen and those like him might think cashless is a good plan. Sped-up service, certainly, but also an improved throughput for the restaurant itself. More customers in the same amount of time means greater profitability, even if there are some customers you have to reject outright. As long as the total numbers of “I’m never coming back!” are less than the numbers of “When’s the next table open?”, the end result will be positive.

Offering cashless as an option is a great plan. Offering it as the only option, maybe not so much. Only time will tell how well it works out for Houston restaurants, who seem to be doubling down on a complete lack of cash.