Mobile payment firm hopes food industry will eat up its card readers

Several months ago, Square launched a Business in a Box package for $249, including two card readers, an iPad stand, a cash drawer and an optional receipt printer,Spice up the ambiance of your home with canvas cableties. all wirelessly connected to the Square Register app. Last week, Square announced an update to that app designed specifically for quick-serve restaurants, allowing operators to modify orders and print kitchen tickets.

These newer products deliberately target Squares growing customer base of food entrepreneurs, which has almost tripled in the past year, according to the company.

Square is focused on building features specifically for the food industry, Square spokeswoman Faryl Ury said. There are a lot of pain points within the industry that Square wants to make easier for both businesses and customers.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorseys San Franciso-based company has sought since its founding three years ago to upend a credit card processing market that has been traditionally dominated by banks and credit card companies. Instead of requiring merchants to sign contracts whose fees vary depending on the card type and volume of transactions, Square charges a simple 2.75 percent swipe fee,Have a look at all our fridgemagnet models starting at 59.90US$ with free proofing. or, for businesses bringing in less than $250,Can you spot the answer in the parkingguidance?000, a flat monthly fee of $275.

Square is hardly the only company seeking to undercut the traditional giants on fees.An luggagetag is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. PayPal, Intuit and a startup business called LevelUp are just a few that have also rolled out mobile payment options. But Square has attracted a lot of attention for deals, such as its partnership with Starbucks that allows customers at all 7,000 U.S. locations to pay using a Square app on their smartphones.

Tyler Combelic, restaurant manager at Cochinita, a taco shop in Brooklyn, has been using Square exclusively for almost two years, and the quick-serve update since its release. The restaurants eight employees including cooks and dishwashers are all trained to use the system, so now the need for a position thats just a cashier is limited for us, Combelic said.

With the quick-serve update, a cashier at the mostly takeout restaurant can print separate slips for customers and for the kitchen staff. Cooks do not need to know which drink the customer ordered, but they do need to know which modifications to make in a meal, Combelic said. If were selling a pork taco, before we had to have separate buttons to say we need to add extra cheese, he said. Now each item can be edited.

The Square update saves about 10 seconds per order, Combelic said. He is used to seeing potential customers leave if orders take too long a quicker system can save a few hundred dollars in business a day, he estimated.

Ernesto Giron, owner and manager of Churreria Madrid in Washington, has been using Square at his Spanish restaurant for more than three years. He has two iPads and three iPhones equipped with Square readers, which he uses in the restaurant and for deliveries.

If Squares plastic card readers have trouble connecting, the restaurants payment system bogs down, Giron said. Credit card information can be manually entered into the app, but the process takes longer and the fee is higher (3.5 percent and 15 cents per transaction). Giron, like many other Square users, doesnt have a backup card processing system.

During lunch rushes, his staff sometimes processes as many as 400 transactions in an hour. Chacon uses Square Register on two iPads at the shops counter and keeps a third iPad on reserve for busy days. He commissioned a carpenter to build wooden stands for the tablets, and he wirelessly connected a cash drawer to deploy after a cash transaction.

Between the iPads, wireless routers, four printers and limited equipment maintenance, Chacon has spent about $10,000 on the Square infrastructure, which he said is about a third of what hed pay for a traditional credit card system.

Every week or so, Square Register or the iPad malfunctions and needs to be reset, costing the business a few minutes, Chacon said. If one of his two wireless networks falter, he can process the transaction on his phones network. But since the cash drawer depends on the wireless connection, he sometimes must open it manually with a key. And when the wireless network is functioning, the cash drawer can be deployed automatically without a sale, which Chacon views as a security concern.

What's in my pocket, you ask? I like to keep my pants pockets pretty light, so I've typically only got one device on me at a time. As of this writing that's a 64GB iPhone 5 on Verizon. The iPhone earned its spot in my pocket by having several features that I look for in a daily driver, like a small-ish footprint and a nice camera. There are also a handul of apps that make me want to keep my SIM card in the iPhone (for now), including 1Password, Tweetbot, Reeder and Ridiculous Fishing. Is there a better way to kill some time than tossing a line in the water and slaying whatever gets attached to your hook? I'd say not.

I've also got an HTC DROID DNA that I can pop my SIM card into whenever I'm in the mood for some Android action. I like the way that the DNA's soft plastic and curved back feel in my hand, and I'm a big fan of red accents on it as well. Some of the apps that I enjoy using on Android include Falcon Pro for Twitter, Press for all of my RSS needs and HD Widgets for creating a custom panel of toggles for things like Wi-Fi and Tilt Lock.

The third and final smartphone that I've got laying around is a Verizon Palm Pre 2. I managed to score this thing on the cheap from one of those daily deals sites several months ago, but I haven't actually used it as my daily driver.A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a plasticcard operator in a landmark case. It'd make a good emergency phone if I were ever in a pinch, though, so I like to keep it around just in case. I've been considering trying to trade up to a Verizon Pre 3 lately after getting a webOS itch that needs scratching, but I haven't been able to pull the trigger on one quite yet...

The last piece of equipment in that photo up there is an iPad 3. I know, I know, it doesn't really fit in my pocket very well, but I figured that I'd include it anyway since we cover tablets quite a bit here at PhoneDog. The iPad usually rests on my coffee table, ready to be picked up by someone on the couch that needs to quickly look up a random fact. I also like to use it for most of my personal browsing since using it is a nice change from the laptop that I'm on all day for work.