BEND, Ore. — The battle over whether cash or cards will rule the payment world has almost always gone to cash, but here and there some restaurants have begun to turn away from the bills and coins.

For David Hatfield, the owner and operator of the Caf?(C) 3456, a restaurant that serves the Bend Municipal Airport, cash just got to be too much trouble and too much of an expense so his restaurant just stopped taking it about 90 days ago.

“We will be pleased to take your debit card, your credit card or a check,” said Hatfield, “but we don’t take cash any longer.”

Hatfield said he had made the switch for a number of reasons. Since his restaurant is about 10 miles outside of Bend, he couldn’t make the run to the bank every day to deposit the cash, he said. In addition, with minimum wage in Oregon running at $8.00 per hour it didn’t make sense to keep paying servers to count out the shifts take each afternoon.

“Cards just helped make things a whole lot simpler,” he said.

Hatfield said he got the idea after hearing a report on NPR about how some other restaurants “back east” had decided to stop taking cash and to only take cards and that opened his eyes to the benefits to his business.

“We really do most of our business in the roughly 90 minutes between noon and 1:30,” Hatfield said. “When so much has to be packed into such a small amount of time, anything we can do to streamline and make the process easier is better for us.”

Servers are still allowed to take tips in cash and Hatfield said they are solely responsible for keeping track of that. “That’s another thing that I don’t have to track,” he said.