Whole Foods Chooses Square For In-Store Payments

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

This is Square’s second major in-store payments deal with a Top 100 Retailer

Whole Foods announced it is teaming up with Square in a new in-store payments deal. This is Square’s second major in-store payments deal, teaming up with Starbucks last year. For Square, this new partnership is proof that the resources the company has been putting into developing software and hardware is starting to pay off.  Last Spring, Square debuted Stand, a card-swiper for iPad registers. Tech Crunch reported that while clients using Square have always been able to swipe customers’ credit cards using a traditional card swiper, the company was interested in creating the hardware necessary to turn the iPad into a full-fledged register. Square hoped that this new technology would be the key to gleaning more deals with large retailers — like Starbucks. The announcement of this new deal with Whole Foods suggests that Square is achieving goals of infiltrating the larger retailers’ aisles.

For Whole Foods, this partnership will provide the retailer with Square Stands and registers throughout the store. While Square technology will not be used in the checkout lines, customers visiting sandwich counters, juice/coffee bars, pizzerias, and beer and wine bars in select Whole Foods stores will be able to complete their checkout using this new technology. This should also help to provide a speedier checkout process for customers, considering several of these store sections, including the sandwich counters, used to require customers to complete their checkout in the main checkout aisles. In other sections like the wine bar that originally provided a register or a standalone ordering kiosk, consumers will now be using Square technology to complete their purchases. The technology will enable customers to add tips to an order or send an email receipt, in addition to expediting their checkout process during their on-the-go shopping trips.

Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods says, “Together with Square, we’ll deliver options to expedite checkouts, and we look forward to developing new concepts to further simplify and improve grocery shopping. Square’s forward-thinking vision and technology makes them an ideal partner to create a convenient, responsive experience for our customers.”

Square technology is not entirely new to the world of Whole Foods, as Tech Crunch says that the retailer has been using the Square Stand in seven of its venues, including stores in Austin, NYC, Florida, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The technology will be added to additional locations in the upcoming months, Square spokesman Aaron Zamost tells The Wall Street Journal.

Despite the fact that this new deal with Whole Foods doesn’t necessarily get Square into the widely used Whole Foods’ checkout lines, Square is optimistic that this is only the beginning to what will be an even larger partnership. For Square, which hasn’t seen a deal this large since Starbucks, Zamost tells the WSJ that, “This is an important move for us. It gives us the ability to scale.” The payment startup faces a large number of competitors, including eBay’s Paypal, and Stripe, which are both attempting to secure larger pieces of the digital payments pie. Even Amazon has announced its intentions to break into the physical world by offering its Kindle tablet to retailers to use as a POS this summer.

There is even talk that Square will enable Whole Foods to break into the highly anticipated realm of mobile payments. In certain venues, Whole Foods will be offering customers the option of a mobile checkout using the SquareWallet payments application.

What is the role of receipts in the changing world of POS technology?

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