CLink misses the boat! (a take on the "no cash" policy)

The news about the stadium going to cashless transactions for concessions has gone over... poorly, I guess you could say.

What's frustrating about it to me is that they're trying to do the right thing (particularly from a Sounders-centric point of view) but choosing the wrong, cheaper way to do it.

Here's the deal. Let's just discuss this from a Sounders game perspective, since we're on a Sounders blog site after all.

I served on the Alliance Council for several years. During that time, at least once a year the Club's business people and the stadium's representatives would ask us what they could do to improve concessions, specifically sales.

The most obvious thing was pointed out over and over: LOWER PRICES

But beyond that, one thing that it seemed it took them a few years to fully grasp is that the nature of a soccer game is such that they're just not going to sell as much as they do to, say, Seahawks fans.

They no doubt look at the numbers and see that Sounders fans spend a significantly lower amount, per fan per game, than the gridiron football fans do.

It's because there's not enough time. You can show up 10 minutes prior to a Sounders game, take your seat, watch the first half, and there's really only ONE main period when they have a chance to sell you their food/drinks: halftime.

(Side note here: That lower time also means it's far easier for fans to just skip the higher prices at the stadium and snag much cheaper beer/food at any of the many, many choices available within a 5-10 minute walk of the stadium. The stadium prices as though they have a captive audience, and they don't.)

Halftime is just 15 minutes long, so you really have to move people through those lines FAST. Each transaction must be done in as little time as possible.

And that's the single biggest place where the stadium needs to get more efficient.

So. Get rid of cash!

Well, that'll help, but it's not going to help significantly enough that it'll seriously shave time off each transaction. The reasons are many- volunteers working the concessions booths who screw up the transaction, the time for the card reader itself to function, cards that don't read properly the first time, if a receipt needs to be signed there's time there, time spent fishing the card out of the wallet, etc etc etc.

On top of that, a large part of each transaction time is spent just ringing up the order to begin with (and any fan who's spent time watching someone who just showed up that day hunt and peck through the menu to find the right button for whatever you order knows what I'm taking about) and then fetching the various food/beverage items.

So. Doing away with cash will represent, at the most, a minimal improvement on the average time to complete a transaction.

(Personally, I suspect they know that, and it has as much to do with cash control as anything; there might be some people with sticky fingers working the tills and helping themselves to a bit of the cash each time.)

So. Let's identify the main tasks in a single food/beverage transaction:

• Place/take the order
• Fetch the items
• Pay/collect payment

Each of these things has inefficiencies built in. The nature of the concessions workers (again- mostly volunteers who don't do it regularly) means each of these things takes longer than it needs to.

The stadium's "solution" here is to try and marginally improve the time needed for just one of these tasks for just the 25% of the crowd that use cash.

BUT! There is a way to vastly improve things, IMO.

How? Let customers do as much of these tasks as possible.

Let's move the first two parts of the process to the fans via the supercomputers that nearly everyone is carrying in their pockets. Build in an online ordering method that works via mobile web, integrated into the Sounders app, or usable via a stadium-specific app.

People order on the app- no more standing there waiting for the concession stand worker to get your order taken. People pay with the app- no more issues with cash for the vast majority of fans, and for the fans, once they preset their payment preference (debit/credit card, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal, Zelle, Bizum, Venmo, whatever) it's set and payment is essentially instant for subsequent orders.

Voila! Now all the concessions people need to do is assemble the order. The customer can come pick it up for free, or have it delivered to the seat for an additional fee.

If there's a deadline prior to halftime (say, order by the 30th minute) then the food can be guaranteed to be ready to go.

This means you could move the work of completing 2/3rds of the transaction process onto the fan- and automate it so it goes as smoothly and easily as possible.

This isn't a particularly revolutionary idea; it's been done for a decade, though it's really taken off in the past few years.

There's challenges. Anyone who's tried to use their phones during halftime knows what I mean; the connectivity in the stadium needs to be upgraded enough that it's a reliable method to use.

But this is what the stadium really needs to do. It'll cost more to implement, but it'll pay off with a much better experience for the fans in the long run AND it'll sell more concessions.