[s1rech]

I had heard from square, but never bothered to look up what they exactly do. I've been surfing through their wikipedia entry and website (very nice design!), and it looks very intriguing.

Now the question is of course, who has had some experience with it? Is this confined to SF, other american cities? Does it work as elegantly as it looks? Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.

[wwweston]

> Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.

I don't think Square is confined geographically, at least within the US, but I have my doubts will help with the "processing at restaurants takes forever" problem. Most restaurants who plan to take cards already have merchant accounts; Square is most helpful if your problem is "I'm a person or small vendor and want to accept credit cards from other people, perhaps even on-the-go."

(Or, if this Quora question is any guide:

http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-pl...

if your problem is that you haven't been able to find a workplace environment that's sufficiently uncircumspect about its place in employee's lives and the world.)

I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. There might even be incentives to do that: moving people faster means you can server a higher volume of customers. Whether that'd be enough to overcome Good Enough+Inertia is the question.

[jarek]

> I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table.

Pretty much every even slightly classy restaurant in Canada has mobile POSes the server brings to your table and you use to punch in your credit card PIN (or it prints the receipt for you to sign, if you have an ancient or American card).

It still takes too long and I wish the limit for RFID-authorized transactions was higher so I could tap rather than PIN, but at least the card remains in my sight at all times.

[dmckeon]

tl;dr - we use Square & like it a lot.

Using Square is faster and more convenient than cell-based (Nurit, Verifone) processing: enter total, swipe, sign screen with a stylus or finger, and, only for customers who have never paid with Square on that card before: receipt via SMS or email (or none)? and enter phone number or email address. Customers often got the receipt by SMS before leaving the shop.

Using a Nurit meant total, swipe, wait for connection & authorization, print paper receipts for merchant & customer, get customer to sign and return merchant receipt, make sure merchant & customer end up with the right bits of paper, credit card, and pen.

It may sound like a trivial difference in reading the steps, but when dealing with a flurry of customers the ability to spend more attention engaging with customers while still handling payments correctly is an important difference.

We are on our 4th credit card processing technology in 8 years (paper imprinter, pay by cell & numeric entry, Nurit, Square), and Square is the best so far at making payments a trivial part of the sales process instead of a minor hassle.

[SoftwareMaven]

It's not just a Valley thing. A local corn maze was using iPads with them last year as the POS terminals for what would have previously been a cash-only affair.

[achompas]

I've seen Square used by vendors in NYC and DC, and my Miami friends use it to transfer money around.

[Multiplayer]

We use square for somewhat large (10k-15k) rental transactions. They have always been really accommodating and even when we were newly using them released our funds far faster than anyone else would. Great service.

[azylman]

A lot of the small, new businesses/restaurants in Evanston, IL use Square with an iPad for POS.