Beware the Square when Using Sapphire
 

I frequent a small, independent coffee shop near my mansion in West Akron. Normally, charges there code as restaurant purchases and receive the extra-point UR bonus when using my Sapphire card. However, the shop recently switched its credit card processing to Square, specifically the Square Stand pictured below.

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/sla...gle3-large.jpg

That change means charges now code as general purchases instead of restaurant purchases. Thus, no UR bonus, so you may not want to use your Sapphire card at restaurants using Square.

By the way, you'll see "SQ" (for Square) in front of the store name in the transaction detail.

RNE, telling you to beware the Square.

Not just sapphire, it would be all cards and not all square readers code as general I think. Depends on the store.

My heads up applies no matter the store. The presence of the Square could affect the coding. That's all I'm saying.

P.S. You're welcome.

I've had square purchases properly code as restaurants on my Freedom, has there been a change?

This. One gelato/coffee shop near me uses PayPal and I don't get the 2x points there.

As for Square, I looked through my recent activity for my CSP and found two food places that use it. One has "SQ *RESTRANT" at the beginning (I got 2x for that) and the other one just "SQ*" (which didn't give me the 2x). I looked in the Register app and the only setting that I see that might affect this is for tipping. Otherwise it might be something that's set up when the business first creates a Square account.

Here's an update. Turns out charges at that Square-using coffee shop are not coming through as general purchases (like Chase told me) but as "Select Grocery Strs". So at least for the rest of this quarter, I'll use my Freedom card there and get the +4 UR-point grocery category bonus—which is better than Sapphire's +1 UR-point restaurant bonus anyway. Of course, that advantage will end next month when Freedom's quarter categories change.

To repeat: Don't assume nothing has changed when you see a new payment method at a store. Its category may too have changed, even though it's the same business. Go figure.