Buying a Square Meal with the Square Payment System

"Do you have cash?" my wife asked me as we were driving through southern New Hampshire the other morning. "If you do, we could stop at the Farmer's Market."

I did have a little cash (twenty-something dollars), so we did stop. Just inside the door, we ran into an offer too good to refuse:  a local farmer selling frozen guinea fowl (odd-looking birds that, when prepared right, are more delicious than chicken). We wanted to buy a pair, one for dinner soon and one for later, but that would have nearly taken all my cash.

"Do you take credit cards?" my wife asked. Farmers here hardly ever do. The overhead and expense just isn't worth the trouble. For small farms in New England, margins can be thin even in a good year.

"I do," said the farmer, and he pulled out a Droid phone with a small white square attachment on it. I recognized it immediately as a Square credit card reader. I'd read about Square, but I had never seen one of their readers in person. Certainly, they weren't common at farmer's markets last year.

I knew they could be attached to iPads and iPhones and now I could see they could be attached to Android phones as well. The farmer swiped my wife's credit card through the Square reader. He handed her his phone and asked her to write her name on the screen using just her fingertip.

"Would you like a receipt?" he asked. We gave him my phone number, and he texted a receipt to it. A moment later, I felt my iPhone vibrating in my pocket. The receipt had arrived.

We strolled through the market and visited with friends. About 45 minutes later, our friend Liz sold us some lamb and swiped my wife's card:  Liz, too, now has a Square reader now.

The Square software recognized my wife's card and automatically queued up my phone number for the receipt. Liz said that if she wanted, she could use the camera in your phone to take a picture and have it sent along with the receipt. Again, my iPhone buzzed with a text message from Square.

You know a technology is easy to use and affordable when it shows up at a farmer's market in rural New England. Square's early adopters were in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco (where Square is based) and New York City. But if farmers in small-town New Hampshire—as hard-nosed and practical a bunch of business people as you could expect to meet anywhere—are adopting this technology, I think Square is going to be hugely successful. I know some of these farmers, and I could never imagine them, say, meeting with a overdressed salesperson who's offering merchant services entailing a set-up fee and monthly charges. These farmers would, however, jump at the opportunity to get a free card-reader that attaches to a phone they probably already have. Square imposes no obligation on merchants; it simply charges a flat fee (2.75%) on transactions. The guinea farmer sold a brace of birds he would have otherwise taken home in his cooler. The fee: 2.75% of $28.75: about 80 cents. Worth the sale at a farmer's market. And if I hadn't bought the birds, he would have owed Square nothing. That's the kind of risk/reward pay-off that even a skeptical Yankee can accept.

Square is clearly catching on. Though they launched less than 2 years ago, they've gained over 800,000 customers as of December (USA Today). They're processing millions of dollars of payments every day.

I'll toast them when I cook those guinea fowl.