Advertisement

The Zurich bakery where you can't pay with cash (but bitcoins are fine)

Author thumbnail
The Zurich bakery where you can't pay with cash (but bitcoins are fine)
Only three percent of people in Switzerland use their smartphones for cashless payments.

Switzerland may have some of the most beautiful banknotes in the world but a new bakery in Zurich doesn’t want a bar of them.

Advertisement

The new Buchmann bakery in Zurich’s Universitätsstrasse is a real rarity in Switzerland: a retail business that accepts electronic payment options ranging from bitcoins to Apple Pay but which won’t take plain old cash.

Read also: Swiss man loses shopping bag containing 800,000-franc cryptocurrency stash

“The circumstances were right because here in the university district there are lots of young people and students who are tech savvy,” Buchmann manager Daniel Wehrli told Swiss news portal 20 Minuten.

Wehrli said going cash-free made sense from a hygiene point of view and also meant less work for staff as they did not have to tally up takings and carry these to a post office at the end of the day.

“But we also wanted to make a stance. For us, cashless payments are the way of the future,” the Buchmann manager told Zurich daily Tages Anzeiger.

There have been a couple of negative comments from customers but most people have welcomed the move.

Read also: Switzerland's 'gorgeous' 10-franc banknote voted world's best 

“You usually have more problems because a shop doesn’t accept credit cards,” one customer said.

But customers who are only carrying cash do have a last option: they can put their purchases on a tab and pay the next time they are in the store.

Reverting to cash payments is also the last resort if internet services fail completely.

A recent poll by Swiss price comparison website Comparis found cash was the preferred payment method of payment for 40 percent of respondents in Switzerland against 34 percent for debit cards and 25 percent for credit cards.

However, the poll also found only three percent of people used their smartphones for contactless payments while only one percent of respondents said apps like Apple Pay were their preferred payment method.

More

Join the conversation in our comments section below. Share your own views and experience and if you have a question or suggestion for our journalists then email us at [email protected].
Please keep comments civil, constructive and on topic – and make sure to read our terms of use before getting involved.

Please log in to leave a comment.

See Also