SQUARE UP FUCKING SUCKS

A Cautionary Tale About Square Ups Business Practices

We recently opened a retail store and set up a kiosk with Square Up. Before doing so we went through a variety of hoops, including a site audit, credit check and full background check of the owners before being approved. Once approved we spent $8,428 to implement Square’s payment processing, which included buying a kiosk from Square $868, paying $2,000 to Fishbowl to implement inventory integration and paying 3 employees to implement the products and testing the system, in total cost us $8,428. We operated the system for about a month and suddenly on Black Friday 11/26/21 the system shut down.

In a panic we called Square and after a half hour wait were able to speak to an Indian woman whose heavy accent was nearly incomprehensible. We spoke to identify the problem, which was difficult considering her accent and at the end we were able to pick up the mention of an email. We looked up the email and found the following response.

Once we acknowledged the email to the lady on the phone it was end of story. Essentially once we hung up there was no way to contact Square again. Square’s system automatically recognizes our phone number and says, “we're sorry your account is closed” and will not allow us further access. Which is incredibly infuriating because financially there’s no recourse, we are out $8,428 and have an un-usable kiosk sitting in our store. Most companies would have no choice but to accept their fate, but Square has never dealt with X Products, we are vengeful. If Square thinks we will roll over and lie peacefully, they are dead wrong. We’ve made it a point to create negative feedback and are hitting all mediums, we’ve wrote this blog and we sent them a back bill. We don’t expect them to reverse their decision, but we do expect them to pay up.

If anything, we hope people read this and understand that this company at any time can shut you down and cause you immense horror with zero recourse. In our case they could have easily told us at integration when they reviewed our site (because we specifically told them what we do) that we were ineligible, but instead chose to let us spend time and money for a system that ultimately would be useless. Even worse they turned the system off on the largest sale day of the year, which suspiciously seems to us a planned event.

A good company, one whose compassionate about customer service and their customers, like us, should have taken a different approach. For example, acknowledging that they made a mistake in evaluating our business, and instead of shutting us down, gave us a grace period to find an alternative, and possibly offering to refund us for the equipment and other purchases. Not Square Up, instead they took the cheapest approach, where they cut us off entirely from both sales, and customer service and have given us little recourse than to run a smear campaign.

Our hope is that you read this blog and choose to share this story and find an alternative to another big tech company who only cares about the bottom line and their own agenda. If we continue to support these companies, we will essentially be supporting communism and control over our livelihood’s.

Bottom line, don’t do business with Square Up.