Fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen is getting rid of its green—cash that is. The Washington, D.C.-born chain will only accept payment from credit cards or through its mobile app starting Jan. 18 everywhere except the DMV and Boston according to a report from Business Insider. The District, Maryland and Virginia will still accept cash until March, while Boston won't change over due to state laws.
The move has been a long time coming. Sweetgreen started testing going cashless a year ago in six locations, with a notable jump in service speed without the need to count cash. Bringing the same system to the roughly 60 non-Massachusetts locations seems like a big step, but Sweetgreen has been pointing out how relatively few of its transactions involve cash since it released its app in January, around the same time it relocated its headquarters to Los Angeles.
Faster service and less incentive for robberies are good reasons for going cashless, but it could leave potential customers behind. The less tech-savvy salad lovers may not want to always pay by card, even with the employees Sweetgreen plans to station at every store explaining the new system. And, if you're part of the approximately nine million households in the U.S. that don't have a bank account, you're basically out of luck.
Nothing is set in stone of course. Sweetgreen, which likes to describe itself as a tech company, has a whole team testing out ideas to grow online orders, improve the app and try out other new ideas. That's a key reason it keeps scoring major investments from venture capital firms like Revolution, $95 million in total so far.
