The Grandstand at the Iowa State Fair.
A spokesperson for the Iowa State Fair says you will be able to buy a corndog on a credit card at all vendors when the gates open for the 2020 edition.
Mindy Williamson says it’s something that’s been in the works for a while. “It’s one of the top things that people ask us. Some of our vendors — in fact over half of them — currently accept credit and debit cards. So this isn’t a big change to many of our vendors,” Williamson says. She says more and more people only pay with plastic.
“You know this is 2019 and many of us don’t carry cash. We are still allowing for the option to pay with cash, we are just making it more convenient and giving you more options,” Williamson says. It is a trend that impacts everything you buy and sell. The Iowa Lottery for instance plans to seek a change in law this year to allow customers to use credit cards to by tickets. Williamson says the vendors at the Iowa State Fair are no different than other businesses.
“They’ll also accept Apple Pay and the Google Pay. We just want to make that experience easy for you and we are giving our vendors years to switch over and implement that, because we know for some of the smaller folks it may be a change for them,” according to Williamson. “But many of them have already implemented it in the last couple of years.”
She says they will use one common system called “Clover” that they have tested and built the infrastructure around it. “And the vendors who have tested it so far have had great experiences.” Williamson says they do know that people using plastic tend to spend more — but she says the overriding concern is to be offering a modern form of payment.
“From the U.S. Consumer Reports it does say that 33% of consumers prefer to use credit,” Williamson says. “And so, whether that’s a credit card or debit card…we want to sure that when you wait in line and you get up to the front that you are not surprised that someone doesn’t accept kind of a convenient form of payment that you are used to using.”
Vendors who haven’t been taking credit cards can use the system this year to get ramped up for when it is required by the fair.
