Why Pig & Olive doesn't accept cash

The short answer is no, we don't take cash. We're card only, and that includes contactless and phone payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Some people won't like that, and that's fair enough. Everyone's entitled to pay how they prefer, just as we're entitled to decide how we run our business. But before anyone concludes we're "anti-cash" or following some agenda, I'd ask you to hear out the reasoning, because the reality is far less exciting than that. It comes down to running a sustainable independent business.

Cash isn't free

There's a widespread belief that cash saves businesses money because there are no card processing fees. It doesn't. Cash has costs of its own — they're just less visible.

Every day, cash has to be counted, checked, reconciled and stored securely. Floats have to be prepared each morning before we open. Takings have to be carried to the bank, and the bank charges us to pay them in. We have to order change, which also costs money. Insurance premiums go up. Safes need installing and maintaining. Every discrepancy has to be chased down and every mistake takes time to put right. And cash creates opportunities for theft — sometimes from outside the business, occasionally from within it.

The biggest cost is time

When we looked at what cash handling would actually involve across our three locations — cashing up every night, preparing floats every morning — it came to well over 1,000 staff hours a year.

That's time spent counting notes and coins rather than serving customers, training our team, improving our food or developing the business. When you run an independent hospitality business, those hours matter.

We'd rather spend that money on people

Hospitality has never been under more pressure. Food costs are up, energy costs are up, employment costs keep rising. If we can strip out over a thousand hours of admin that adds nothing to the customer's experience, we're going to do it. I'd much rather that money went towards employing another member of staff than paying someone to count cash — another person helping customers rather than standing in the office balancing a till. For us that's an easy decision.

It's also about keeping our team safe

Some of our sites operate with lone workers, and not handling cash removes one more risk. There's no cash left on site overnight, nobody walking to the bank with the takings, and far less reason for anyone to target our staff. That was a genuine factor in the decision, not an afterthought.

The money stays local either way

One last thought. Nobody bats an eyelid at paying Amazon, their energy supplier or their streaming services without cash — money that leaves the local economy the moment it's spent. When you pay by card at Pig & Olive, that money stays here. It pays the wages of the local people we employ, goes to the suppliers we buy from, and supports a business owned and run by people who live in this community.

How the payment arrives matters far less than where it ends up.