Rowley Farmhouse Ales no longer have a safe to keep cash in.
The brewhouse restaurant doesn’t need one. This month, it went cashless, meaning patrons have to pay for their goods with debit or credit cards or digital wallets.
Anyway, thieves stole the safe, and all the cash in it, sometime late in the night on Election Day.
That’s why Rowley’s is going cashless, said co-owner Jeffrey Kaplan.
“They ripped out our safe and about two grand. Plus the safe cost about a grand,” he said on a recent afternoon at the restaurant, located in the midtown area.
That was the second of two recent robberies of the place, he said. The thieves netted $2,000 in the first robbery as well.
So the restaurant’s management team got together to consider options to provide safety for their employees, discourage crime and reduce cash loss.
Eliminating the cash factor seemed the best route, he said.
“They know restaurants have money,” Kaplan said of criminals looking for cash. “We said, ‘Let’s make this less of a target.’ ”
Through Rowley’s may be the first Santa Fe restaurant to take this approach — John Bradbury, head of the Greater Santa Fe Restaurant Association, said recently he had not heard of any others doing so — at least one restaurant owner in Albuquerque has been cashless for nearly a year.
The six Burritos Alinstante restaurants in Albuquerque and surrounding areas have been cashless for nearly a year now, said Mary Ellen Chavez, who runs the restaurant chain.
The reasons? Too many robberies where people with guns and wrenches and other weapons or tools came into the restaurants threatening employees and demanding cash, Chavez said.
“We had been robbed six or seven times in one of our stores in a very short period of time — six or eight weeks — and my employees were terrified,” she said. “We were trying to figure out how to keep them safe and keep them going [to work]. And our solution helped everyone in that location feel a whole lot better.”
Having tried the cashless approach first at that one site, on Broadway in Albuquerque, the company soon adopted it for all of its restaurants.
The move did not come without an initial cost, she said. By her account, in the first month or two of the new policy, her restaurants lost about 7 percent in revenue.
And more credit card use among customers means more restaurant payouts to those credit card companies — somewhere between 3 percent and 4 percent for each transaction, she and Kaplan said.
But Chavez hasn’t regretted the move. Over time, the initial losses from customers who paid only in cash leveled out.
More importantly, he said he has not experienced any burglaries or robberies since implementing the new cashless policy, which means his employees feel safer.
Kaplan said in telling some regular customers of the new cashless plan, a few expressed disappointment and said they would no longer come to the brewhouse restaurant.
“We wonder if some of them are unbanked,” he said, meaning people who pay only with cash because perhaps they don’t have a bank account or credit card.
But, he said, before the new policy only about 10 percent of customers paid with cash. At Chavez’s six restaurants, the percentage of customers paying cash only before the policy was 25 percent, she said.
Those numbers would not surprise anyone who paid attention to a summer Gallup poll that found 6 out of 10 people said they either never used cash anymore or only used it for “a few” services.
That report said 64 percent of Americans believe it is “very likely” or “likely” that the US will be a cashless society during the span of their lives.
A recent Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation report said about 4.5 percent of all United States residents — about 5.9 million — are unbanked. It lists New Mexico as one of several states in which at least 5.6 percent of residents are unbanked.
Reilly White, an associate professor of economics at the University of New Mexico, said about 7 percent of New Mexicans are totally unbanked, so they don’t have ways to pay for things without cash.
“Many people trust cash only,” he said.
He said there are a number of benefits for businesses to go cashless — though the question of whether they will end up excluding people who have no other way to pay remains. Those people are often from low-income or immigrant households, he said. In addition, older people still often prefer to pay with cash, he said.
“They could lose a small part of their customer base,” White said of companies that go cashless. “That is the risk.”
And “Yes,” he said, he could also see America eventually becoming a