Notre Dame Stadium is in its second year of going cashless, and its effects have prompted the entire campus to switch to accepting cards only. While this is Notre Dame campus’s first year going cashless, this is Notre Dame Stadium’s second year operating as such. All athletic facilities went cashless last year as well.
The move was promptly made after the Coronavirus pandemic, to limit the movement of physical cash.
Another reason involved security implications regarding cashiers’ handling of money. “We had a lot of people in our food area sitting there counting money.” Wendy Mott, Cash Manager for the University in the Office of Treasury Services, said. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars go through in cash, and they were spending their whole time counting it. Sometimes we would have up to three people count the same deposit.”
This process also caused problems due to a shortage of employees. “Right now we have a lot of difficulty in hiring people, as everybody does, and especially in those food service areas,” Mott said.
“Instead of counting cash, [employees] are able to be deployed to do other important things in the job as necessary, as [the University has] difficulty hiring her people.”
With a cashless process comes many benefits for the audience. These include saving time for the audience by ensuring faster lines when receiving food. “They don’t have to wait as long,” Mott said. “I think it’s a time saver.” This process was implemented in 2018 by GrubHub, where the client can order food and be in line without his physical presence in attendance.
While she gave praise to its benefits, she also acknowledged the difficulties many international students face due to a lack of resources when coming to the United States. They usually come without a bank account, she said, but instead with physical cash. Thus, the treasury department worked to place handheld devices which trade physical currency to a card.
“Something we did different this year,” Mott said, “was that we rolled out kiosks, Campus card kiosks, that are located one in Duncan and one in LaFortune.” In addition, students can use their Domer Dollars from their Irish1card, which can be used in stadium venues. “Hopefully,” Mott said, “80 plus percent of the students shouldn’t even be impacted by going cashless.”
For the football game vs. Stanford on Oct. 15th, Levy, a third party concession stand vendor, will roll out a new credit card system, which will make transactions faster. As Lee Sicinski, Associate Vice President of University Events, said via email, “We will be replacing our point of sale system with a product from Shift4. Moving to this new system should modernize the purchasing experience, allow for faster transactions, and provide a wider variety of cashless payment methods (tap-&-go, Apple Pay, Android Pay, etc). We expect this technology to ultimately enhance the experience for all fans, and get them back to their seat faster.”