Cashless Jazz Fest sees slow food, drink lines on first day | Where NOLA Eats

Within hours of the 2023 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival opening on Friday, much of the talk around the Fair Grounds was mired in complaints about the length and pace of lines for food and beverage vendors.

This is the first year Jazz Fest is cashless, entailing new systems at each vendor booth to accept credit cards, debit cards and digital payments. No cash is accepted across the festival. This puts Jazz Fest in the mainstream for big events and large venues. Caesars Superdome, for instance, is cashless, too.

But the change brings a major shift for how Jazz Fest vendors operate, replacing the mostly hand-to-hand cash transactions at these booths with a new interface for customers.

Initially on Friday, the shift seemed to be working smoothly. With a tap of a chip card against the digital reader, transactions were completed in a few seconds.

But by midday, as more people arrived, lines for most food booths were stretching deep, in some cases impeding the flow of foot traffic around the vending areas. Some queues started turning back on themselves to snake against the walkways, making the end of the line hard to discern for would-be customers walking up.

“I’ve been festing for 35 years, and this is the first time I left the fest hungry,” New Orleans native Jay Duke said. “I just couldn’t invest 30 minutes in each line.”

A Jazz Fest official wasn’t able to comment immediately on the day’s issues.

While frustration mounted in the afternoon sun, a few hours made a world of difference. By 6 p.m., with the Jazz Fest headliners on stage, food booth lines that once looked impenetrable were nonexistent and transactions were swiftly processing.

Vance Vaucresson, who represents the festival’s longest-running food vendor with his Vaucresson sausage po-boys, said there were issues with the speed for transactions during peak hours. But he also said demand was unusually high.

“This was the busiest Friday I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I ran out of bread by 1 p.m. and had to get more, then we ran out again. It’s pretty unbelievable.”

Lines are typical for food and beverages at Jazz Fest, especially for some of the most popular items. Earlier on Day 1 this year, though, the pace at which the lines were moving seemed to be the big issue.

Individual transactions observed around the grounds showed some people still sailing through swiftly, while in other cases people had to swipe their cards multiple times for the transaction to process. At one beer tent, a reporter clocked orders for multiple drinks taking more than a minute to complete.

Cashless transactions are the norm across the retail world now, and Jazz Fest’s move to electronic transactions was widely reported before the 2023 festival. Still, many festival goers seemed unsure of how to pay at food booths, with booth staff needing to walk them through the tap, swipe or insert options for cards, further slowing the process.

Comprehensively cashless

In the past, some vendor booths accepted credit cards, although this was an option alongside cash. This year’s change to cashless is comprehensive and applies to all sales across the fest, from tickets at the gate to craft and merchandise booths.

It’s the food and beverage vendors, however, that see the greatest volume of small transactions, and where the speed of service is key to keeping lines moving.

Festgoers may use cards and digital payment methods (such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay), and those who arrive with no currency except cash may buy cards at cash exchange stations where ATMs were found in years past. These cards may also be used outside the festival.

Before the festival began, some food vendors had expressed concern about the speed of transactions. Jazz Fest said it had a suite of supporting infrastructure for the data demand, with officials the week before the festival began that they have “created a new, private network engineered specifically for and dedicated solely to Jazz Fest business during the event.”