All signs point towards cashless schemes eventually pushing physical money out of society. If the Church of England’s introduction of contactless payments across 16,000 churches wasn’t convincing enough, you need only talk to 73% of Britons who don’t expect to be using physical money in less than three years’ time. And now SPAR, the supermarket franchise, is seemingly welcoming the cashless society.
The retail titan upgraded its university store in Utrecht, under the sub-brand SPARUniversity, to utilise a cashless-only service named Skippen via the SPAR university app. Incentivised by potential rewards such as free coffee or lunch, students can scan physical products to appear on their smart devices for purchasing and avoid the perilous journey to the cash register.”
The app allows SPAR to analyse customers’ specific purchasing data in order to refine and hone the service based on location. Indeed, with such data in hand, the franchise plans to eventually expand Skippen into all nine of its university campus stores across the Netherlands by the end of this year.
Although cashless stores is a forward-thinking concept for franchises, the handling of private data is certainly a sticky one, given the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation snapping into action on Friday May 25. So if you’re thinking about following in SPAR’s footsteps, you better tread carefully.”
