Together with her six-year-old daughter, a woman from Zurich attended the Queen concert in the Hallenstadion in Zurich on Tuesday. “When the ice cream seller walked through the rows with a metal bowl from the 80s, I wanted to buy my daughter an ice cream,” says the woman. To her surprise, she found that cashless payment is not possible. “Because I didn’t have any cash with me, my daughter looked at me very sadly. Luckily another visitor offered to pay for the ice cream. I then twined him the money.” Nevertheless, she says: “You can now pay for eggs or cheese with Twint on every farm, but not in the Hallenstadion. I found that really strange.”
The Hallenstadion is aware of the problem. In the large concert hall, there are sometimes problems with the connection due to the large amount of technology. The additional service of the mobile ice cream seller is currently the only point of sale in the Hallenstadion where you can only pay with cash, as it is said on request. The introduction of TWINT as an additional cashless payment option is expected to take place from September after a six-week conversion phase.
“Here, too, the difficulty is that despite the good network expansion, cell phone reception can collapse throughout the building, especially when there are many young people on site streaming events with their cell phones,” says Stefan Marxer, member of the group management. He generally recommends always having some cash with you, despite cashless payment options, because of the rare but never completely ruled out system failures for all parties involved, from credit card issuers, payment processors, network providers to the cash register system.