After a number of big announcements this week, it’s hip to be Square.
Square announced several upgrades and features to its platform this week, including an expansion of tools for restaurant owners and operators, new intelligence capabilities under its Square AI suite, and the unveiling of Square Bitcoin, allowing platform users to conduct transactions in Bitcoin.
As a cherry on top, Cash App, a sister company to Square under its parent firm, Block, also announced Neighborhoods, a feature that connects customers with local businesses, creating local networks in which customers can place orders and accumulate rewards points to spend with nearby businesses, and helps those businesses create followings and marketing channels all within Cash App itself.
Square’s announcements, made by company leaders at an event in New York City on Wednesday, made one thing fairly clear: Square has its sights set on being much more than a two-dimensional point-of-sale vendor. It wants to provide small businesses with an entire suite of technology and tools that can help those small businesses compete with much larger companies with vast resources, especially in the food and beverage space.
Square’s focus on food and beverage
Lindsey Irvine, Square’s chief marketing officer, tells Fast Company that Square’s focus on the food and beverage industry, particularly as it relates to these recent announcements, is founded in the fact that restaurants—be they diners, coffee shops, or full-service sit-down steakhouses—are the “lifeblood” of many communities.
“One thing we looked at from the data standpoint, and a unique differentiator for Square, is that we’re the only solution that operates in every type of business in a given neighborhood,” she says. “And if you dig in, restaurants have the most vibrancy.” That is, restaurants tend to see more foot traffic and conduct more transactions than most other types of businesses. So, there’s a lot of data to be analyzed, and a lot of potential problems for business owners to solve.
Accordingly, “We want to plant a flag and build a platform for restaurants.” Restaurants, Irvine says, are also fairly complicated to run, so creating a platform with restaurants in mind could be adopted by other business types with relative ease, which also made it an easy place for Square to start when developing its new tools and features.
While Square is rolling out several new tools, Irvine says she thinks that its Order Guide, a tool that leverages AI to help restaurant owners dig into their revenue and costs and look for alternative suppliers, among other things, is likely the most exciting. “I think, on a practical level, the Order Guide and the potential cost savings are big,” she says. “This is what restaurant owners talk about every day: increasing prices. The only option they have to find savings is to go through their list, vendor by vendor. There was no solution,” she adds. “But we’ve done that for them.”
At the event on Wednesday, restaurant owners on-hand—which included Henry Laporte, the co-owner of the three-month-old French Dip restaurant Salt Hank’s, and Jake Dell, the fifth-generation owner of Katz’s Deli, a 137-year-old New York City institution—shared their enthusiasm about the new tools, including the Order Guide.
“That could be big for us,” Laporte said on stage during a panel discussion about the new tools. “The price of beef has gone up 25% over the past month,” he added, saying that it would be big if tools like Order Guide could help him look for alternative suppliers.
Squaring up to what’s ahead
Looking ahead, Irvine says that Square plans to hold more events like the one in New York—which was the second “Releases” event the company has ever held. She envisions there being two per year, one on each U.S. coast, and perhaps even international events. The goal, she says, is to make Square’s presence felt nationwide, especially on a neighborhood level, where some of Square’s competitors may feel more distant.
When her team is on the ground, speaking with business owners, “there’s a wild amount of pent-up demand” for some of the features that Square is rolling out, Irvine says. “People trust us, our POS is their lifeblood, and at the end of the day, we’re finding ways to help them grow. We’re showing up authentically.”
While that doesn’t necessarily mean that every mom-and-pop sandwich shop is going to dive headfirst into the Bitcoin ecosystem—and Square Bitcoin is designed for, and only for, Bitcoin transactions, not other types of cryptocurrency—having the option to accept it is not something they can get through other broad platforms.
To finish off the event, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, as a part of a fireside chat with Randy Garutti, the former CEO of Shake Shack and current board member for Block, said that Block itself is, in a way, coming full-circle back to its roots as it renews its focus on helping small businesses generate on-the-ground insights and beef up their point-of-sale platforms. Square’s announcements, he says, help position Square and Block as a go-to business partner for what’s to come.
“We want to be a company that’s 10 steps ahead of a customer’s expectation and desire,” Dorsey said. “I think we’re now, finally, getting back to that, which is how we started the company.”
But Dorsey reiterates that even Square’s early plans and goals underwent big revisions as he and others learned more about what its customer actually needed, rather than what they wanted to create for them. That, again, has resulted in some of the new feature and tool rollouts. “There was no grand vision” early on, Dorsey said. “You have to feel it. You have to discover. There’s no true invention,” he added.
Being able to adapt, Dorsey said, is what’s given Square the ability to come as far as it has. “Those are the things that really break the company’s potential open. They’re unexpected,” he said. “Those unexpected things are what gives you lasting power.”
