Old credit card machine free#

Kais Davis of Eugene said he used Square for 'rent, settling debts with roommates, poker tournaments, selling collectables, craigslist.' Basically all the peer-to-peer payments a young man might make.įor big businesses, Square can be more expensive than the standard card reader. His usage seems to be pretty standard for individuals. He found out about the service the way you tech nerds probably did: from Twitter. He tends to use it for personal things, like splitting the food bill when he goes on vacation with family. Kevin Druff, an IT consultant in Richmond, Virginia, said he used Square rarely, but likes it. They also found the technology exciting when it was their first time using it. He also noted that relative to their old way of accepting credit cards, it seems more secure for passengers. 'It's a lot quicker and easier,' Mabyae said. After four months of use, he loves the device. He said that his entire cab fleet converted to Square at the request of the company's owner.

Old credit card machine free#

I caught the Cincinnati cabbie, Aziz Mabyae (above), during a free moment. She'd gotten his card and passed along his contact information to me.

A company representative said that the cap originally was instituted to protect against fraud, and one presumes that the loads of transaction data they've gathered has enabled them to spot bad actors in more sophisticated ways.Īnd for many customers before and after the thousand-dollar switch, Square is working just fine. A Twitter contact's wife had ridden in a taxi in Ohio that used the payment system. Square, for its part, appears to have removed the $1000 per week limit, or more precisely, the $1000 limit only exists for the first week as Square checks out the transactions being made to ensure they're not fishy. In online forums, that seems to be one of the major knocks on the company. That in turn caused problems when they wrote checks against the income and the money wasn't in the bank. That caused their funds to be held for longer than the couple days they had been.

One day, they 'made too much money,' Overturf said, meaning they'd charged over $1,000 worth of transactions in less than seven days. They did have one big problem in the months they've been Square customers. Overturf likes the machine, particularly because it allows him to move around the nursery and make sales on the spot. Overturf said it was actually an easy decision because the Square hardware was free and the cut that Square takes was less than they'd paid before. 'We were in the process of ordering one and we went to the Farmer's market of all places and all the guys there were using them.' 'Back in the rainy season, we cover our credit card machine with plastic, but the wind blew the plastic off and the rain hit the credit card machine and we were out a credit card machine,' Overturf said. It turns out that local farmers converted the nursery's owner after their standard machine broke. I asked him how and why the nursery made the switch to Square. Anthony Overturf answered the phone with a laidback vibe that made me quake with nostalgia for the West Coast. The first business I talked with was The Tree Man nursery in Paso Robles, which is a small city north of San Luis Obispo in central California. How were all these people finding out about it? I called up a few customers, one of whom I got a hold of through Square and others through Twitter.

I was particularly to see that the whole southeast is blanketed with Square users. Just about every major city and plenty of smaller places have someone using the device. This map is good news for Square, which recently took in a $100 million venture investment and put Larry Summers (yes, that Larry Summers) on its board. The size of the bubble represents the volume of the transactions while the different colors indicate the types of users that Square has. The map you see at the top of the page shows one hour of transaction volume on a Friday afternoon. I asked Square to make me a map of their transactions to see where they had users. Over the last few months, I started to notice Square doohickeys popping up all along eastern seaboard. Coffee shops are using them. Would people and businesses whose lives didn't revolve around technology toss away their old-school credit card machines? It didn't seem likely. We were on Valencia Street, after all, the epicenter of the Bay's hipster world, and both of us worked (at the time) for Wired. But I wondered if it had mainstream appeal.