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Crime pushes shops to go cashless
Jun 19, 2023
More Oakland merchants say safety outweighs fees, equity ideals
By Rachel Swan
After suffering three burglaries in two years, workers at Asha Tea House — a small shop in Uptown Oakland — made a wrenching but practical decision: They stopped accepting cash.
“We’re hoping it solves the problem,” assistant manager Angel Her said on Friday morning, standing over a flat-screen register bearing a small “credit cards only” sign.
Across the street, on the same block of Grand Avenue at Broadway, proprietors of Cafe Umami had placed a similar sign in their window, with a picture of a dollar bill crossed out. The cafe barred cash roughly a year ago, following a spate of break-ins in which thieves seemed to beeline for the register.
“We’d keep getting robbed for about $50, and the cost of fixing the door was more,” employee Haemi Lee
said. Once the sign went up, she added, the burglaries stopped.
As crime spikes in shopping districts throughout Oakland, more businesses are forbidding cash transactions — a move so controversial in San Francisco that the Board of Supervisors passed an
ordinance in 2019 requiring all merchants to take
The legislation emphasized “San Francisco’s ethos of inclusivity,” which extends to people who are denied credit or cannot get bank accounts. No such law exists in Oakland, where cashless sales — enabled by
credit cards and smart-phone apps — became more commonplace during the pandemic yet now appear driven by fears of crime. In recent months, “no cash” placards began popping up on storefronts throughout Uptown and downtown, in the Laurel, along College Avenue and on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Most of these corridors lie in “Police Area 2,” a swath of the city bounded by Lake Merritt, the borders of Piedmont and Berkeley and Highway 13 near the Caldecott Tunnel. Area 2 has witnessed 137 commercial burglaries this year, up slightly from 135 at this time last year, but nearly triple the 52 reported as of the second week of June in 2021, according to data from the Police Department.
Robberies are up as well — from 113 through June 11, 2021, to 121 last year and 134 this year. Given those numbers, representatives of business districts in Oakland say they are not surprised to see their members reject cash, even if it means shutting out some customers, and paying fees on every credit payment.
“If a merchant is only accepting credit cards (and other cashless payments), that’s cutting anywhere from
2.5 to 4% of their profit margin,” said Chris Jackson, manager of the Rockridge District Association. “But
what are they going to do? People are desperate. Businesses are trying to figure out ways to survive.”
“It’s like the ‘Beware of dog’sign,” Daniel Swafford dryly observed. Swafford, who serves as the
executive director of the Laurel District and Montclair Village associations, is keenly aware of the uptick
in commercial burglaries and robberies, with thieves often striking at night, breaching doors or smashing
windows and ransacking businesses in search of a safe. These break-ins can easily turn violent if a worker
happens to be on the premises after hours, Swafford said.
With the advent of new payment technology, many merchants don’t handle much cash anyway, and some
find it’s no longer worth the risk, Swafford said.
Some shop owners who no longer accept paper money describe it as a drastic choice, made after
considerable hand-wringing. Like the supervisors in San Francisco, many Oakland merchants worry about
excluding low-income customers or others who don’t carry smartphones or credit cards. But ultimately,
business owners said they had to stave off the damage from burglaries and prioritize the safety of
employees who in some cases were being held at gunpoint.
“It was brutal,” said Joel Di-Giorgio, co-owner of Arthur Mac’s Tap and Snack, a pizzeria and beer garden
in North Oakland. For DiGiorgio and his business partner, banning cash was a last-ditch fix that followed a
raft of other security measures: They had already spent $20,000 on security cameras, laser alarms, panic
switches, strobe light and horn-sound alarms and met with city officials and police captains to discuss
crime in the neighborhood, said DiGiorgio, who also runs Farm League, a restaurant and bar management
group with businesses throughout Northern California.
Yet a series of armed stickups left the restaurateurs with no choice but to ditch their cash register,
DiGiorgio said. The last incident occurred at 8:30 p.m. on June 26 of last year, when two men stormed in,
one cocking a gun at an employee behind the counter. Shortly thereafter, workers put up signs with a
crossed-out dollar emoji.
Since then, they haven’t seen any robberies, said DiGiorgio, who still has misgivings, and feels he defied
his ideals about social equity by going cashless.
Shops in Chinatown and Fruitvale still seem to use paper currency, possibly to accommodate shoppers
who may not carry credit cards. Nonetheless, some of the Chinatown mom-and-pops are installing credit
card machines, a transition that community leaders applaud, said Jessica Chen, executive director of the
Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. She and others are encouraging merchants to remove “cashonly” signs from their window displays, a move she hopes will help insulate them from thieves.
For Kevin Greene, owner of a haberdashery on 14th Street that was ransacked by burglars days before its
scheduled opening in February, cash never seemed like an option.
“No cash — that just eliminates the problem,” said Greene, whose shop, the Suit Lounge, is stocked with
men’s couture: blazers, cashmere sweaters, slacks, dress shoes with buckles, fedora-style hats with red
brims. When his store was burglarized, thieves snatched $45,000 worth of merchandise in minutes, said
Greene, who had to replace everything.
He’s since posted a “credit and debit card only” notice on the door to dissuade prospective burglars, by
signaling that the store has no safe or register. Greene also keeps his front door locked during business
hours.
Around the corner, bicycle shop owner Greg Archer said he still accepts cash, and thinks it’s a “wonderful”
currency, especially since each credit card purchase tacks on a 25-cent charge. Nonetheless, he understands
other merchants’ apprehension about crime. Days ago, Archer walked by a liquor store at 12th and
Franklin streets as it was being robbed, bystanders helplessly watching the perpetrator sprint to a waiting
car.
Such robberies occur daily, said Greene, whose shop is three blocks away. Speaking on the phone Tuesday
morning, Greene said that just 20 minutes earlier, he’d seen a man case the street outside his shop, wearing
a mask and a backpack.
“The feeling I got from him was — he was out lurking,” Greene said bleakly. “I feel safer with that sign.
‘We do not accept cash.’ It’s very necessary.”
Reach Rachel Swan: rswan@sfchronicle.co
Oakland Police Officers' Association
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