Vending company Pepi Food Services has signed an agreement with wireless, cashless payment and M2M telemetry solutions vendor USA Technologies, Inc., to go 100 percent cashless by the end of 2012 using USA's ePort Connect cashless payment and telemetry service. Two years ago, Pepi began working on a plan to roll out a cashless solution to its vending machine base over the course of a five-year period.
“Our decision to go cashless was really about the customer experience,” says Pepi President/Founder Vic Pemberton. “We’ve had such a great customer response to the cashless experience on our vending machines that we decided to speed up the implementation. We knew we were going 100 percent cashless eventually—that was always our vision—and with USA Technologies’ JumpStart program, there was really no reason to wait. We like to say we’re doing it because we have to 'feed the kids'—that kids today—even my own—just aren’t carrying cash. In fact, we’re noticing that many more of our customers now get their paychecks on a debit card. At Pepi, we want our customers to be able to buy with whatever is in their pocket.”