Does anyone carry cash these days?? Nearly everything can be paid for with your credit card or phone lately, and that can present a problem for people who make a living on that spare change. From Real Change:
With a new app launched today, for the first time, Seattleites can pull out their phones and scan a QR code to pay for an e-version of Real Change, the city?s weekly street newspaper sold by homeless and low-income vendors. Local Google volunteers developed the app over the past two years as part of a volunteer project– encouraged by the company–to find an effective technological solution to the challenges Real Change faces in a marketplace where more transactions are taking place electronically. As of today, the app is available for download on iOS and Android phones.??Cashlessness is a challenge our vendors face on a daily basis,? said Timothy Harris, founding director of Real Change. ?This app will help our paper survive in the digital age, when fewer people have ready access to cash and more people prefer to read news content on their mobile devices.?
Starting today,?participating Real Change vendors will have badges with individualized QR codes. Customers who have downloaded the free app can scan the QR code to purchase a digital version of the issue from that particular vendor.
The price for downloading an e-version of the publication is $2.99 (including a fee from digital content providers) while the paper copy will continue to cost $2. Vendors will receive the $1.49 from the sale of the digital version, and $1.40 from the sale of the paper version.
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