bobby1413 Call me "Mr Cynical", but I just can't see the club or whoever is going to make and implement it, doing it correctly without any glitches. 20'000 supporters going to buy a drink, and testing a brand new system... there maybe trouble ahead.
Good points raised, especially about the refund of the money you put on the card. Surely if you top the card up with £5, then the next week if you want to, you can get that £5 back in full without loss. Somehow I doubt it will be that easy, as they'll probably charge some sort of admin fee or something.
Also, if you borrow someone's member card and you don't have one then you're pretty stuffed. However, this is not the clubs problem really.
Seems a bit of a con really and a solution to the wrong problem. The problem being that the staff they have are not able enough to do the job required. However, I would imagine it's probably quite hard to get enough good staff to do that job, especially as it's for 90 minutes, twice a month. Not much motivation for them.
On the first paragraph that's why they're not testing it on 20000 supporters - the trial is just for the Upper West - to let them iron out glitches and see how it performs - so all credit to them for not foisting it on everyone in a "big bang" stylee.
I'd also be very surprised if they did charge any admin fee to get money back - I'm not sure that would be justifiable or even legal, and I'm not convinced they'd be able to persuade anyone to use the system if they tried.
Agree on the last paragraph - I think it's clear to everyone that Compass (the catering company which runs the kiosks) does not pay for the right calibre of staff to enable the queues to move quickly without error. Paying more would get better staff who are more competent and motivated. But perhaps the contract RFC has with Compass means that they can't do this without increasing costs - if so, that's good for RFC commercially, of course as they've obviously negotiated the contract well.
Personally, though, I don't have any great problem with this - I can't see how it's an attempt to rip off fans, it doesn't mean I have to carry another card with me, and after the first few matches (when people are getting used to it) it will , hopefully, speed things up even if it's a little bit. But of course, as with all systems, there will be teething problems - remember the early days of the smart card ticketing system?
The biggest problem, from talking to other supporters about these systems, is that you can generally only load the cards up in denominations of £5, £10 etc - which won't be a problem for regular supporters but could be a problem for those who only come occasionally, as they'll have money they can't use left of their card.
