Someone at the register asks if she takes bitcoin.
I have watched this moment go badly for years, and I used to think the problem was belief. Convince her the money is sound and she flips the switch. I was wrong about that. She already half agrees with you. What stops her is the next ninety seconds.
Run through what she is holding in her head. Her card reader puts money in her bank account overnight, in dollars, with a fee she has already budgeted for. Her bookkeeper closes the month on that. Her weekend hire, who is sixteen, has to run it without calling her. And when a customer brings a croissant back on Thursday, the refund has to come out at the same value it went in.
Bitcoin payments answer some of that and stumble on the rest. Money arrives in seconds and it costs her less than the card does. Chargebacks, where a customer disputes a card charge weeks later and the shop eats the loss, do not happen. Those are real wins, and they are worth leading with.
Then the other side. The price moves between Monday and Thursday, so every refund is a small argument waiting to happen. Her books may have to record each sale twice, once as a sale and once as letting go of an asset. And the terminal already sitting on her counter probably cannot do it at all.
So lead with the fee she pays and the disputes she loses. Freedom can come later, once the machine has earned her trust.
Fair pushback, and it is strong. None of this helps if customers never ask. You could solve the bookkeeping, the refunds and the training perfectly and still find there is no demand, and no shop owner installs a second way to take money for a queue that never forms. Plenty of stores that accepted bitcoin in 2014 switched it off for exactly that reason, and they were not being ideological either.
What would change my mind: shops with all of that friction cleared away, books clean, refunds clean, staff trained, still declining at the same rate as before. That would tell me it was belief the whole time.
Ask a shop owner what she pays in card fees this year. Start the conversation there.
