Waffle House caters to the cash-free

Waffle House's long-standing cash-only policy is about to disappear like a plate of sweet cream waffles.

After 50 years of staunchly avoiding payment by plastic, the Georgia company will start accepting Visa and Mastercard at its 713 company-owned stores next month.

"We would get letters to the corporate office asking why we didn't take them," said company spokeswoman Charnae Knight. "Our motto for the longest time was, 'We're looking out for the poor old cash customer.' But we realized no one carries cash anymore."

To keep its customers and keep pace with rivals, Waffle House had to change its policy, Knight said.

"We were one of the only establishments that didn't take credit cards," she said. "It was the No. 1 customer request."

Owners of the approximately 800 franchised Waffle House locations will decide whether to accept credit cards individually.

The Triangle's franchised stores will do so, said Bryson McKinney, district manager for Freeway Foods of Greensboro, this area's franchisee. "Pretty much everybody's come to the conclusion that you have to take them."

Even McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants beat Waffle House to the credit card reader by at least a year, said Paul Stone, president of the N.C. Restaurant Association. "It's becoming a paperless society, and restaurants compared to any other business have been the last holdout," he said.

Still, the decision doesn't come easily, especially for Waffle House, which has price-conscious customers who end up with lower average bills, Stone said. On average, restaurants make a net profit of 3 percent, and credit-card fees can eat up more than half of that.

Fees or not, accepting credit-card payments really isn't optional anymore, said Joel Cohen, founder of Cohen Restaurant Marketing Group, a Raleigh-based restaurant consulting firm.

"Once somebody says 'we don't take credit cards,' a flag goes up and I ask why not," he said. "You don't want a customer to be disappointed or angry when they're paying because it's the last impression that really counts."