SF Homeless Now Accept Card
Square wants to give homeless people the ability to accept credit card payments from anyone who’s willing to spare a dollar.
Square, a large payments startup headquartered in San Francisco, produces card readers that can be attached to a normal smartphone or tablet, instantly enabling a user to take credit and debit card payments with a simple swipe.
Project Square Cares, announced last week, aims to donate thousands of Square-branded credit card readers to panhandlers throughout San Francisco so that they can take Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express from any passerby.
I met with Karen Stone, Square’s self-described “Community-ista,” by the Civic Center BART station, where a group of Square engineers had set up a table to distribute card readers to a line of scraggly men and women.
“We at Square care about giving back to our community, and we thought long and hard about how we could improve the lives of the most vulnerable members of society.”
Ms. Stone, dressed in a Square t-shirt and hoodie, looks like the quintessential tech worker. While many anti-gentrification critics complain about tech workers being uninvolved with the neighborhoods they live in, she explains that Square is one of the first tech companies to aid the homeless.
“We’re proud to provide Square payment systems and card readers to the many organic coffee shops, artisanal mini-donut bars, and fancy toast bakeries that have recently opened up around this neighborhood. Last week, a Latin-Faroese Fusion food truck tweeted at me to say that they love our product! But now it’s time to move our focus from hip small businesses to the people sleeping outside of them.“
A normal San Francisco homeless person.
Soon afterwards, I tagged along with Fernando Cortez, a “staff design-gineer” at Square, as we journeyed into the Tenderloin to conduct user research. Five minutes later, somewhere between Turk Street and Eddy Street, Mr. Cortez accidentally stepped into a pile of human feces in the middle of the sidewalk. Luckily, Fernando was unfazed.
“This is all rather new to me, personally,” Cortez laughed. “I haven’t met too many homeless people until now, since I usually Lyft to work and back.”
We walked a few more blocks, taking care to avoid stepping on the discarded needles, broken glass shards, and (of course) excrement that littered the ground, until we reached a somewhat sketchy corner by Market Street.
Cortez took out an iPad and an Apple Pencil, then began to jot down notes furiously.
“When we first started Square Care, we wanted to find out why users — I mean, donors — didn’t want to give homeless people money. We decided that if we were going to understand why, we’d had to live a day in the shoes of people we were trying to help.“
As we spoke, a couple on the other side of street approached a scruffy looking man. He stepped in front of them, extending a cup to ask for change. They averted their eyes and mumbled some sort of apology as they veered around the panhandler and continued on their way. However, as they crossed the street towards us, another man near us wearing raybans, distressed jeans, and a Square t-shirt stepped out and extended an iPhone with a Square card reader attached. After an awkward pause, one of the two men in the couple took out a credit card and swiped it.
Cortez smiled and marked something on his iPad. “Good job, Johnny. That’s going on your performance review.
“Anyway, in our user research, we found that the biggest barrier to homeless people receiving donations is friction in the payment experience. Many of the homeless people we observed would ask passers-by for spare change, only to hear, ‘Sorry. I only have card.’
“But giving homeless people card readers is only one part of the solution. Over time, we found that 87% of donors gave change because they wanted to feel better about themselves, making us realize that it was going to take some out-of-the-box thinking to craft a delightful experience for donors. Now, thanks to our integration with Snapcash, you can donate some change AND send your friends a cute selfie of you and your new homeless buddy!”
Soon, a group of homeless people began to gather and gawk at us, no doubt wondering why a bunch of well-dressed yuppies was asking strangers for money and seemingly doing a better job of it. Cortez turned to them and smiled. “Hello there! Would any of you like to learn how to double your panhandling earnings with this one easy trick? Just download this Square app and take this card reader.”
The group started murmuring amongst themselves. “What did you say? Did you just call me a fucking square?” shouted one man. “An app? Like an application? How do I apply?” asked one of the women.
Cortez laughed, holding out a palm full of small square-shaped card readers. “Now, now, just calm down. Take this free card reader and — ”
“FREE?”
The homeless group rushed Cortez, grabbing card readers from his hand. As we watched the group disperse and walk off with their new card readers, an awkward silence ensued.
“Well that went well!” Cortez said cheerily.
After a beat, I asked Cortez if he was worried about the feasibility of the program considering how few homeless people own smartphones, bank accounts, sources of power, or data plans.
“I understand that those are common concerns. Payments are a tough space to operate in, and we here at Square are not ashamed to be ahead of the pack. If technology is not solving your problems, then you’re not using enough technology.”
#blessed #giving #charity
Square Cares is not only an act of charity, but it’s also a shrewd business move. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that there were over 600,000 homeless people in 2012, of whom 23% are families with children. Yet very few companies are prepared to cater to the next big consumer demographic.
I sat down with Mobo Adeleye, Square’s Head of Business Development, to talk about Square’s plans for the burgeoning homeless market.
“Square’s mission is to make commerce easy,” Adeleye told me as we sipped coffee from Square’s in-house R&D coffee bar. We were on the 6th floor of Square’s swanky Market Street headquarters, looking out a huge floor-to-ceiling window with a breathtaking view of Civic Center.
Adeleye has a calm, assured manner about him. He sports Oliver Peoples glasses, a tastefully unbuttoned collared shirt, and a Harvard Business School class ring. “Begging for money is really no different from freelancing, contracting, or starting a small business. You plan your own days, you have to hustle to survive, and your success is linked to establishing your own personal brand in order to differentiate yourself from the competition. The most successful panhandlers, like the Bushman, succeed at all three. We at Square think homeless people aren’t just vagrants: they’re entrepreneurs. Our goal is to make the homeless experience just a little more awesome.”
Square already employs complex data analysis algorithms to help small business owners make better decisions. Similarly, Adeleye believes that homeless people could “derive significant value from integrating their daily operations with our platform. We can then leverage this data to find geographic ‘hotspots’ of high donation activity. Armed with these insights, homeless people can optimise their begging productivity by setting up in areas where they’re more likely to get donations.”
Square has also established a new payments tier with special benefits for homeless Square users. In addition to the tiers for big businesses, small businesses, and 1099 contractors, Square has created a “homeless” tier where Square charges only 2.5% per swipe (instead of the normal 2.75%), in what Adeleye described as “a huge but noble sacrifice that shows our unwavering support for the homeless community.” He told me that Square intends to merge the 1099 tier and the homeless tier in the near future, “since most 1099 workers are paid so little that they can’t possibly afford a house in San Francisco.”
There is already controversy over the increasingly widespread proliferation of Square card readers in San Francisco. Privacy activists claim that Square is intruding upon the privacy of the homeless by harvesting their panhandling data for commercial purposes. Neighborhood watch associations are concerned that muggers will use Square card readers to extract credit card payments from unfortunate citizens at gunpoint, as was the case in several incidents earlier this year. It remains to be seen what impact Square Cares will have in the long term.
As I walked out of the front doors of Square HQ, I was met with the sight of a throng of protesters holding banners and chanting slogans.
“First they swipe our cards, then they swipe our community!”
“Goes to show you, there’s no difference between panhandlers and yuppie tech scum!“
“Fight against the smelly neoliberal oppressors!”
“Homeless people want to gentrify neighborhoods like the techies do so THEY can move in!”
I managed to push my way through the people in the crowd, who had begun to kiss each other in silent protest.
As I stopped to rest outside of the BART station, I saw a homeless man with a Square card reader on the sidewalk. As I watched, he extended his smartphone and card reader to a woman walking past and asked for a dollar.
“Sorry,” the lady replied, “but do you take Venmo?”
