Theoretical Aloha Credit Card Question

[alohaakamai3]

A store manager of ours in a college town made an interesting observation about credit card usage in his Aloha system. He noticed cards being used to buy a beer at a time, 5 times in an night. Students didn't keep tabs open- they would just rather pay as they go.

With the per swipe transaction fees, and then multiplying it by many students, it adds up to be quite a bit after a while.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a SYSTEM solution for this. Human solutions- trying to enforce a minimum, etc, were too difficult in the chaos of a crowded college bar. I do think Aloha has ability to enforce minimums, but again, I know they usually violate the merchant agreement and just unnecessarily annoy customers.

Giving some kind of a discount for cash was also considered, but I'm not sure how that would work yet.

Anyway, I'm open to all suggestions here. Just wondering if anyone had any ideas of observations.

 

[TobeThor]

Put in an ATM machine...

 

[RokStar]

Make sure you follow PCI - Pay Cash Instead

 

[Shift4SMS]

The problem you are having is that the card associations try their best to make it impossible for merchants to keep "open tabs" without full risk to the merchant for customers skipping out. There are a few ways merchants are doing tabs (pre-auth an estimated amount upon opening a tab, holding the card, holding a knuckle buster copy of the card, etc.), but "technically", credit card regulation wise, all are violations. The only two methods the card associations recognize is a credit card swipe per beer or, keep the tab open, without prior approval or card on file, and perform a single auth/swipe for the tab amount when the tab is closed. Of course the latter carries the skip risk to the merchant -- not a concern of the card associations.

Steve Sommers

http://www.shift4.com

-- Creators of $$$ ON THE NET(tm) payment processing services

Blog:

http://paymenttidbits.blogspot.com/