Ireland

Cashless coffee shop opens in Dublin

Husband and wife team Stephen and Ruth Deasy of Bear Market Coffee shop. Picture by Press Association 
Husband and wife team Stephen and Ruth Deasy of Bear Market Coffee shop. Picture by Press Association  Husband and wife team Stephen and Ruth Deasy of Bear Market Coffee shop. Picture by Press Association 

A new Dublin coffee shop may be the first in Ireland where customers cannot pay with cash.

Bear Market Coffee, in George Street, is completely cash-free, which owners Ruth and Stephen Deasy say means staff can concentrate on providing better customer service.

Ruth said cutting out the cash means less stress for baristas.

"We do get times where everyone comes in together, with 20 or 30 people in the queue," Ruth said.

"We've found that the person on the till is quite stressed trying to sort out change, so they're not really engaging or explaining different cakes that we have because they're under pressure to get down the line.

"With contactless, the customer just taps their card, so they can spend more time talking to staff or explaining what they want, and everything can be done really efficiently."

Bear Market partnered with Magnet Networks, a telecommunications and data connectivity provider, to include a pre-order app and Wi Fi.

"We have so many lines that if one goes down, another can pick up, we've two tills, two credit card machines, the till system will be on a different WiFi from our customers, so there's no cross over.

"It's really secure, really high-end, so we've hopefully thought of everything."

She said the idea came after a visit to a cashless store in New York, and added: "We thought it was a lot more relaxed and a quicker process to get to the till and get your coffee, and the customer service element was more streamlined.

"When we started looking at our figures, we found that around 80 per cent of our sales were on card."