The Weekly Grind: AI & Tech News for Cafe Owners - 28 September 2026
Every week, we round up the most interesting AI and technology news that matters for independent cafe and coffee shop owners. No jargon, no hype - just what you need to know and why it matters for your business.
Four weeks and two days to the Budget, and this week the trade comes to town. The Caffè Culture Show opens tomorrow at the Business Design Centre in Islington, and the first story is on its floor: an AI company on stand F11 pitching cafes hairnet alerts from the CCTV they already own. The company's own website names "Staff Discipline" as a focus of its service and retail product, and the government's consultation on workplace monitoring closes on Wednesday night. From Thursday to Saturday Revolut ran a trial of paying by face in three London cafes and announced a till to go with it, with a 0% fee that turns out to cover one kind of payment. A security start-up says scammers have seeded tens of thousands of web pages so that AI answers sometimes serve up their phone numbers, and a BBC Wales investigation earlier this month found fake festival organisers taking small traders' money. On Sunday the government said it will extend the Jobs Guarantee, which covers a young person's minimum wage for up to 25 hours a week for six months, to young people on health benefits from April 2027, and the detail that matters to a cafe is in the scheme's small print rather than Sunday's announcement: who picks the hire. And Square can now send your opening hours to Apple Maps in the UK, days after Google wrote down that you have four days to reject some strangers' edits to yours. Five stories, and one question under all of them: when something that used to sit with you - your staff footage, the payment at your counter, your bank's phone number, your choice of hire, your opening hours - passes through someone else's system, how do you check it?
One follow-up first. Last week's diesel story said the RAC thought a new all-time high "increasingly likely" in the week just gone, and that the sentence might be out of date by the time you read it. On Friday the RAC said the record of 199.09p "will almost certainly be surpassed over the weekend"; its own daily figures had diesel at 199.05p on Sunday, the latest figure out when we checked, 0.04p short, and PetrolPrices said on Saturday that on its own forecourt data the average had passed it, at 199.11p. Whichever number you prefer, the questions for your suppliers about the fuel surcharge line have not changed.
An AI Company at Caffè Culture This Week Pitches Cafes Hairnet Alerts From the CCTV They Already Own - Its Own Website Names "Staff Discipline" as a Focus of Its Service and Retail Product, and the Government's Workplace Monitoring Consultation Closes at 11:59pm on Wednesday
On Friday 25 September the Caffè Culture Show published a press release from one of its exhibitors, Youreye Technology, on stand F11: "Youreye AI Technology makes your existing CCTV cameras smarter. Youreye AI is an artificial intelligence software layer for the cameras you already own. It detects risks and operational issues in real time and delivers automated reporting to improve performance." Its exhibitor profile makes the cafe pitch explicit: "For the cafe and coffee shop industry specifically, our solutions can detect hairnet, mask, glove and apron compliance in real time, flagging any breach directly to management through instant alerts on desktop and mobile." The same profile says it works "without the need for extra hardware", and lists "staff activity" and "cash handling" among the things it monitors. The FAQ on Youreye's own website is more specific about the hardware: "Youreye only requires your cameras to be IP cameras. If you're using existing cameras, a minimum resolution of 720p is required", and "You'll need a recording server where the camera footage is stored." Its homepage claims "Over 95% average accuracy", a figure we have no way to check, and says "Data is never transferred abroad". None of the four brands its website says it works with is a UK cafe.
The page worth reading is not the show profile. Youreye's service and retail page opens: "We turn your existing cameras into intelligent management tools for monitoring service quality, staff performance and customer flow in real time." Under it: "Focus: Efficiency, Service Speed and Staff Discipline." Then it lists the scenarios a customer can switch on. Under a heading for customer and barista interaction: "Our system monitors the duration and quality of interaction between staff and customers in service areas." Under cash handling: "When a cash transaction is detected, the system instantly triggers an alarm and records real-time footage of the event." And for customers, under "Emotion Analysis": "Analyses customer emotion to generate data for improving service quality and experience", and under "Age and Gender Analysis": "Provides customer-profile and demographic insight through age and gender classification." So the company that leads its cafe pitch at the show with hairnets also offers, on its own website, scenarios that time your baristas' interactions with customers, sound an alarm on every cash sale the cameras spot, and sort your customers by age, gender and emotion.
None of that waits for new law. The Information Commissioner's Office guidance on monitoring workers already names this kind of product: "there are CCTV systems which: can capture both video and audio; use facial recognition; or work in conjunction with AI to assess productivity or undertake emotional analysis of the people being recorded." And: "You are only likely to be justified in using continuous video or audio monitoring of workers in rare circumstances." If you are considering video or audio monitoring of your team, you must "complete a DPIA", a data protection impact assessment, "inform workers about the extent and nature of the monitoring, and why you are carrying it out", and "make anyone else caught by the monitoring, such as visitors or customers, aware of its operation and why you are carrying it out". The ICO flags that this guidance is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act and may change, so read the current version before you rely on it.
The government's consultation is the other half, and the date is the news, not the document. "Make Work Pay: workplace monitoring technologies" opened on 8 July and closes at 11:59pm on Wednesday 30 September, the second day of the show. GOV.UK says it is "seeking views on proposals to support the fair, transparent and responsible use of workplace monitoring technologies, used to monitor, manage or make decisions relating to workers". The document is stamped "NOT GOVERNMENT POLICY" and "SUBJECT TO CONSULTATION", says the inclusion of its options does "not indicate a settled government preference", and says that if the evidence does not show "a clear problem", "no intervention remains a legitimate outcome." One option is a statutory code, and the document is careful about what that would and would not do: "A failure to follow a statutory Code may not in itself give rise to penalties or allow workers to make a tribunal claim." What it would do is narrower. Tribunals would take the code into account in existing claims "such as unfair dismissal or discrimination" where monitoring formed part of the facts, and "Where a worker succeeds in such a claim, and the tribunal finds an employer has unreasonably failed to follow the Code, it would have the discretion to adjust compensation by up to 25%". Whether the code should carry that adjustment at all is question 38. The document also restates the law you already have: "Where monitoring is intrusive or high risk, such as when it involves profiling, biometrics or continuous monitoring, organisations are legally required to carry out a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)." The proposals would cover England, Wales and Scotland, not Northern Ireland.
And one more deadline, a day earlier. The revised tipping code consultation closes at 11:59pm on Tuesday 29 September. The duty to consult your team on your tipping policy is already written into section 14 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 but is not in force yet; this consultation is on the revised code that goes with it, and the government says it expects the new requirements and the updated code to come into force "in late 2026, subject to the Code being approved by Parliament". Our tips guide's summer update said there was "currently no consultation duty and no firm date"; the duty is still not in force, and the guide now carries a dated note on the second draft. You can respond to the tipping consultation online.
What this means for you: If you walk the show floor on Tuesday or Wednesday, this pitch will lead with hygiene, and the first question to ask is the first of our AI guide's five questions for any vendor: "What data does it need from me?" Here the answer is footage of your staff and your customers, analysed by someone else's software. The same guide's warning still applies, because before the first alert you have a DPIA, your signs and a staff notice to write or rewrite: "If a tool asks you to start collecting new data or change your workflow before it delivers value, that's a red flag." So, on the stand: will it work with my cameras, given the FAQ asks for IP cameras at 720p and a recording server, which an older analogue system may not meet? The FAQ says it can run on-premise or in the cloud and stores the footage it flags "only in a secure area accessible to you": which set-up would I get, where would the footage be processed, and will you put in writing who at Youreye can see it? Can the customer emotion, age and gender analysis be switched off? The DPIA is mine to write, not yours, so what will you give me in writing to help? How was the 95% measured? And the guide's fifth question: "Does it replace something I'm already doing, or add new work?" On hairnets, keep the claim in proportion. GOV.UK's guidance for food businesses does say staff preparing or handling food should "keep hair tied back and wear a suitable head covering such as a hat or hair net", so the point is real; a camera alert checks that one line, not your food safety management as a whole. On the cash alarm, our cashing-up guide already made the case that "The overwhelming majority of till variance is training or process, not theft", and that treating "every short drawer as a theft investigation" will "destroy the trust that makes a good team good". Switch that scenario on and an alarm on every cash sale treats every cash sale as an incident. On timing your baristas, the point our wage variance post made about clock-in cameras carries over, and it was about goodwill, not law: "Fitting cameras to the clock-in screen or chasing individuals over six minutes will cost you far more in goodwill than you'll ever recover in wages, and in a labour market this tight, that's a genuinely bad trade." If you already run CCTV, our licences guide covers the fee almost any camera brings: "Running CCTV for crime prevention is not on the ICO's list of exempt processing, so if you have cameras you almost certainly owe the fee, whatever they point at." Tier 1, for a turnover up to £632,000 or no more than ten staff, is £52 a year, £5 less by direct debit. The fee is not the whole of it. Plain CCTV already comes with a duty to tell people, and the ICO says "you must let people know when they are in an area where a surveillance system is in operation"; if the cameras watch your team, the DPIA and the staff notice already apply too. Adding AI does not create those duties. It gives the DPIA a great deal more to justify, and it means your signs and your staff notice have to say what the software does, not just that a camera is there. If you use any staff monitoring, or are thinking about it, Wednesday night is your chance to say what a small employer can actually manage, and you can respond to the monitoring consultation online. And if you do buy something like this, the notice on the door and the paragraph in the staff handbook come before the first alert, not after it.
Read Youreye's show press release ->
Read the ICO's guidance on monitoring workers by video ->
Read the workplace monitoring consultation on GOV.UK ->
Revolut Ran a Three-Day Pay-by-Face Trial in Three London Cafes and Announced a Till at Half Price Until 31 December - the 0% Fee Applies Only When an Opted-In Revolut Customer Pays With Their Face, and It Is Not Clear When You Can Buy the Till
On Thursday 24 September Revolut announced Revolut Pay with Smile, which it bills as the UK's first in-store facial recognition checkout, and a till to run it on. The trial ran from Thursday to Saturday at three Kiss the Hippo cafes, in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho, where "Guests who pay with a smile can order from a special Revolut menu, with speciality coffees at £1", and earn triple RevPoints, Revolut's own rewards, for doing it. Customers opt in through the Revolut app, and as the PA wire reported it, "customers will not be opted in by default, and consent can be revoked at any time", and "If checks pass and a successful match is found, an account-to-account payment is authorised." On our reading, that means it is not a card payment at all. Payments over £200 prompt a second check, Retail Systems reports. Revolut's privacy notice for the service says the temporary facial embeddings made at the till "are deleted immediately after the identity check is completed", that "a secure copy of the original transaction photo is uploaded to our internal cloud systems", and that opting out "triggers the immediate deletion of your biometric template", so Revolut holds a face template for as long as the customer stays opted in. Revolut says personal data is "never stored by merchants".
The fee line needs a slow read. The release's first paragraph promises "0% processing fees for merchants on all transactions". Three paragraphs later it narrows that to "all Revolut Pay with Smile transactions through Revolut Register", and its last paragraph says it again: "Revolut Register is available at a 50% discount for £349.50 + VAT (RRP: £699 + VAT) on a merchant's first terminal until 31st December 2026 for both new and existing customers, with Revolut Pay with Smile transactions always having 0% processing fees." Revolut's pricing page shows what the rest of your payments would cost: in-person card payments start from 0.8% + 2p for UK consumer cards, with UK consumer Amex at 1.7% + 2p and commercial and international cards at 2.6% + 2p. That page says its in-person rates cover "Revolut Terminal, Lite Terminal, POS, and Tap to Pay on iPhone" and does not name the Register, so whether a Register carries those rates is a question to ask, not an assumption to make. The 0% is real, then, and it covers one kind of payment: an opted-in Revolut customer paying with their face. Every card payment at the counter still pays a fee.
The till itself is a two-screen register with a built-in eSIM backup for when the connection drops. The discounted £349.50 + VAT is still more than twice the £169 + VAT Revolut charges for its standard card terminal, the Revolut Terminal, and more than two and a half times its £129 + VAT Lite Terminal. And it is not clear you can buy one yet. Revolut's release says the Register "is available" at the launch price, and Retail Systems says "Merchants can sign up now", but PA reported Revolut as saying that "the rollout of sales of the Revolut Register terminal will take place in due course", and Revolut's website had no product page for the Register when we checked this morning. Revolut launched it alongside its own research, which Retail Systems says Censuswide ran across 2,000 consumers and 1,000 independent hospitality business owners, putting independent venues' spending on "processing and infrastructure" at an average of £875 a month, and over £950 for pubs and bars. That is a commissioned figure covering more than card fees. American Banker reports, citing Revolut, that the Register is also built for "enterprise hospitality operators, retail chains and high-volume venues", so an independent cafe pilot is the launch, not the whole market. Kiss the Hippo's managing director, Alex Damgaci, said, as PA reported it: "We're looking forward to welcoming guests to try Pay with Smile at our Bloomsbury, Soho and Chelsea cafes before we roll out across all 12 of our cafes later this year." Revolut's release gives no date for Pay with Smile beyond the three cafes, though Retail Systems reports Revolut is "targeting a wider rollout later this year", and Revolut has published no results from the trial.
The launch also came less than a fortnight after Revolut admitted a data incident. In mid-September it confirmed what it called a "sophisticated external impersonation scam", in which, The Register reports, it handed sensitive customer information to criminals. The Guardian reported that it affected about 680 of Revolut's 80 million customers, and The Register that the data potentially exposed included verification selfies. Jack Coulson of the privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch made the link himself: "This month, Revolut gave a fraudster the home addresses, passport details, and face data of some users," he said, and "You can get a new passport, but your face is irreplaceable."
What this means for you: In July this column ran SumUp's version of the same move, a 0% fee on payments from its own cardholders, and two lines from that piece still hold. The no-fee sliver of your till "will be tiny at first, because it depends on how many people actually adopt the account", and "a provider you're deeply wired into is also a provider that's harder to leave, which is precisely what a two-sided network is designed to make true." Revolut's version adds two things SumUp's did not: a new till you have to buy to get the 0%, and your customer's face. So test it on the number our card fees guide calls "the only number that matters", your blended rate: total card fees divided by total card turnover from last month's statement. "For most independent cafés in 2026," the guide says, "a healthy blended rate sits somewhere between 1.4% and 1.9%". Give the face payments a weight of close to nothing until your regulars actually use them. Then look at the 2p, because a fixed fee hits a coffee harder than a lunch. On a £3.50 flat white, 0.8% + 2p is 4.8p, about 1.4% of the sale; on a business or overseas card at 2.6% + 2p the same flat white costs 11.1p, about 3.2%. In a visitor town that second line stops being small print. Our non-UK card fees post says that in a Cotswolds tourist town you should "expect 25% or more" of card payments on foreign-issued cards across the summer, and if a quarter of your £3.50 flat whites went at 2.6% + 2p and the rest at 0.8% + 2p, the blend would be about 1.8% rather than 1.4%, near the top of the guide's healthy range. All of that is our arithmetic on Revolut's published rates, not a quote for the Register. Do not switch for this. If your terminal lease or card contract ends before 31 December, add Revolut to the quotes you get, and ask four things: can I order a Register today, which Revolut Business plan does it need and what does that cost, do your published in-person rates apply to it, and is there a minimum term. Our contracts audit puts the honest question about a terminal lease as "when does it end, and what happens on that date if I do nothing". Remember what you would be buying, too: face payments only work through Revolut's own Register, a cousin of the lock-in our EPOS guide describes when it says "Some systems (Toast, parts of Lightspeed) only run on their proprietary hardware." The eSIM is one version of the backup our cashless post says to have if the network drops, "a second provider, a mobile data failover, or a clear plan for the rare bad day", though a backup connection inside one provider's till does not help on the day that provider is down. And if you try face payments at all, the questions will come to you, not to Revolut. The ICO's position is that "If you are using a biometric recognition system, you are processing special category biometric data." Revolut holds that data, but it is your counter and your regular asking, so know the answer before they ask: it is opt-in, it can be revoked, and Revolut's privacy notice says the one-off face codes made at the till are deleted after each check, while a copy of the transaction photo is kept and the face template that recognises the customer is held until they opt out.
Read Revolut's announcement ->
Scammers Are Seeding the Web So AI Answers Serve Up Their Phone Numbers - a Security Start-Up Counted 374 Companies Targeted, the Trick Has Been Reported Before, and the Defence for a Cafe Is a Card by the Till
On Tuesday 22 September Ariel Simon, vice president of research at Vigilance Security, a cybersecurity start-up whose website says little more than "Building in stealth", published research on a campaign it calls "Dark Sourcery", and Dark Reading wrote it up the following day. The mechanism, in Simon's post: "Attackers are flooding the web with carefully optimized posts, PDFs, reviews, and fake support pages, to trick AI into presenting fraudulent phone numbers, email addresses, and login pages." The result, as he told Dark Reading: "A fraudulent support number is presented as helpful guidance, potentially without the user ever looking at the page that supplied it." Vigilance says it found 374 companies targeted across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overview, "with tens of thousands of malicious pages detected", naming major airlines, travel platforms including Airbnb and TripAdvisor, and US banks including Chase and Bank of America. The researchers rang some of the numbers and reached a representative who "wished to help us 'move our flight,' or 'unlock our bank account'" and asked for card details to do it. Some of the fake numbers were planted in reviews, on Yelp and Apple Maps.
The research says the planting is aimed at a moment: "The content focuses on urgent problems like refunds, canceled flights, locked accounts, or money transfers. The goal is to make stressed AI users call quickly instead of checking the company's official website." Then the cautions, from the post and from Simon's interview with Dark Reading. The attack is not consistent: "most of the incidents were statistical. As LLM results are inconsistent, we saw that the attack (LLM citing the fake number) did not reproduce every time we ran the query." By Simon's account, Google classed his report as out of scope, saying AI misinformation and social engineering are not covered by its bug bounty programme, and OpenAI closed it as not reproducible, saying submissions must show proven impact on users. The evidence of actual victims, he told Dark Reading, is so far "a few occurrences" of people complaining. And the post ends with a sales pitch, "my team and I already have a solution", so read the numbers as one company's count. What makes it worth your time anyway is that it is not the first sighting. In December 2025 the security firm Aurascape reported the same technique, including a fraudulent US reservation number that Perplexity, an AI search engine, presented as a "commonly used" British Airways contact. This is the latest sighting of a trick more than one research team has found.
The UK half of the story arrives by ordinary email, and it is closer to home. On Friday 18 September BBC Wales reported that "dozens of traders received professional-looking emails purporting to be from festivals with any requests for money only coming after multiple emails are exchanged", using "the branding, details and even the names of staff from food festivals right across the country, including Narberth, York, Broadmead, Ludlow, Mold, the Forest of Dean, Newport and St Fagans." One local company "paid £400 to the scammers and bought stock to sell at the festival before they realised they had been scammed." The BBC's headline calls it an AI-powered scam and its first line says AI made it possible, but further down the report is more careful: "There was no conclusive proof the scam was powered by AI, but experts have said it would not have been possible five years ago." Giles Mason of UK Finance told the BBC: "Go to the company's official website and contact the organisation through the details on there so you know you're dealing with them direct and not with the scammer."
What this means for you: The 20 July edition covered the scam going the other way: refund scammers using AI image tools to fake delivery-app refund claims that land on the venue, where the defence was your own records, because "Documentation is camouflage." This time the AI is the one being fooled, and you are the one it passes the fake number to. The research says the content targets urgent problems like refunds, locked accounts and money transfers; in a cafe that is the morning the bank app says the account is locked, or the Saturday the card machine dies. No UK bank, card provider or till company is named in the research, and we have found no report of a cafe caught this way. Our reading is simply that the technique does not care whose number it swaps, and "ask the AI for the helpline" is exactly the habit it feeds on. The defence is a short job this week. Write one card for the back office or the till with the real support numbers and web addresses for your bank, your card terminal or till, your energy supplier, your booking platform and your accountant, copied from the back of the card, the provider's app, your contract or a page you bookmarked yourself. Tell the team these are the only numbers anyone rings. Keep the rule narrow: never take a phone number, payment link, login page or software download from an AI answer or a search snippet. That is not a rule against AI. It is the same rule the 31 August edition drew from Starling's assistant and the supplier bank-detail scam: "ring the roaster on the number you already have before you pay, and that phone call is the whole defence against supplier-impersonation fraud." The festival half is in season now. Our markets and festivals post notes that "The Christmas market email lands in August" and that the good ones take applications in August and September. That post was written about whether the pitch pays, not about scams, so today we have added one step to it: before you pay a pitch fee, find the festival's own website yourself, not through the email, and contact them there. Its closing line was written about the economics, but it now carries a second meaning: "Saying yes because the email had bunting in it is the one to avoid." One more inference of ours, since the research found fake numbers planted in reviews: if a review on your own Google listing carries some other company's "support number", report it to Google as spam, as you would any fake review in our Google reviews routine.
Read Ariel Simon's research post for Vigilance Security ->
The Government Will Cover a Jobcentre-Referred Young Person's Minimum Wage for Up to 25 Hours a Week for Six Months, and a Cafe With 4 to 9 Permanent Employees Can Host Up to Two at Once - Now Being Extended to Young People on Health Benefits From April 2027, With the National Rollout Planned From November
On Sunday the Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, told Labour's conference in Liverpool: "Today I can tell you that from next April we will make the Jobs Guarantee available to young disabled people after just three months." The Department for Work and Pensions published its announcement the same afternoon: "Under the scheme, eligible young people on health benefits will be offered a guaranteed job on a voluntary basis from week 13 after their Work Capability Assessment", and "The government will also cover 100% of wage costs up to 25 hours a week for six months." The expansion "will start from April 2027". The scheme it extends was "launched earlier this year for long-term unemployed young people aged 18 to 24 who have been claiming Universal Credit for 18 months", and the release sets it beside Alan Milburn's interim report, which "found that nearly half of young people who are NEET in the UK (45%) report having a disability - more than doubling from 21.1% in 2013/14." The scheme is "intended to help up to 90,000 young people into work by the end of the Parliament". McFadden's speech called it paid work "at guaranteed living wage rates"; the grant guidance for the scheme's national rollout reimburses "the age relevant minimum wage", which is the £12.71 National Living Wage for 21-to-24-year-olds but £10.85 for 18-to-20-year-olds, and DWP has not yet published the terms for the new group. Mind's chief executive, Dr Sarah Hughes, welcomed it and added: "we look forward to seeing the full detail."
The clearest employer rules so far are in DWP's grant guidance from June, written for the organisations bidding to become delivery partners in the national rollout, and they are the story. "The grant will reimburse actual wage costs up to 25 hours per week for up to six months at the age relevant minimum wage, as well as associated employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) and minimum employer pension contributions where relevant." Up to £250 per participant covers starting costs such as uniform and PPE. The six months run on calendar months. Anything above the cap is yours: "Employers can choose to pay Participants at a higher hourly rate or for more hours per week, but they will need to fund this themselves". The money arrives late: "DWP will make the first wage payment after the first six weeks, and then monthly afterwards", and the delivery partner then has up to five working days to pass it on. The size bands are the line a cafe should read twice. An employer with one to three permanent employees can host at most one participant at a time, four to nine at most two, and ten to 49 at most the lower of one per four full-time employees or six.
These are the rules that decide whether it suits you. You cannot bring your own candidate: "Only those referred by DWP will be eligible for the scheme and Participants cannot come through any other route", and "Delivery Partners are responsible for matching Participants to suitable jobs." You do get a say, within limits: "Employers may meet Participants as part of the matching process to understand suitability for the role. Suitability conversations must not create unnecessary barriers to participation." The job can be a vacancy you already have, "These jobs can be new roles or existing vacancies", but it "must not cause an existing employee or contractor to be displaced, dismissed, or to have their hours reduced", and "The job must be equivalent to a job not funded by the Jobs Guarantee". And DWP is candid about who the participants are likely to be: it is "expected that they will have more complex needs on average than for other wage subsidy schemes such as Kickstart." Participants must get statutory employment rights, "including paid annual leave and Statutory Sick Pay". As for when, the guidance says the national rollout "will begin in November 2026 across Great Britain", with "first referrals to start in November 2026 (subject to Grant Funding Agreements and Data Sharing Agreements, and any other governance being completed)". The GOV.UK scheme page, updated on 16 September, says only "later in 2026", and no national delivery partners had been named on GOV.UK when we checked this morning. In the six Phase One areas - Birmingham and Solihull, the East Midlands, Greater Manchester, Hertfordshire and Essex, Central and East Scotland, and Southwest and Southeast Wales - employers are told to contact their area's lead delivery partner directly, and that page lists them. The scheme covers Great Britain, not Northern Ireland.
What this means for you: Two weeks ago this column ran the government looking at slowing the 18-to-20 minimum wage rise, the make-them-cheaper-to-hire answer to youth unemployment. This is the other answer: the state reimbursing the minimum wage for up to 25 hours a week, for a defined group, for six months. On today's rates, and on our arithmetic, 25 hours a week for 26 weeks is about £8,260 of wages for a 21-to-24-year-old at £12.71 an hour and about £7,050 for an 18-to-20-year-old at £10.85; the calendar-month rule and the April 2027 rate rise will move it a little. Under-21s carry no employer NI at 25 hours a week on these rates, and under-22s are not automatically enrolled into a pension, so for the youngest participants that part of the reimbursement is usually nothing. The cash-flow line is the six weeks: about £1,900 of wages at the 21-and-over rate is earned before DWP makes its first payment. If you pay weekly, all of it has already gone out, and if the delivery partner takes its full five working days to pass the payment on, you will have paid out nearer £2,200 before it reaches you, again on our arithmetic and before any employer NI or pension. Our first-hire guide already says to hold "ideally a few weeks of the wage in reserve" when you take someone on; here that reserve has to cover the grant's lag as well. The bigger cost is the one no grant touches. Our apprenticeships guide put it as "the training is largely paid for. The wages, and your time are not." Here the wage is covered up to the cap and your time still is not, and although the delivery partner must give participants tailored wraparound support, which may include mentoring, DWP expects them to have "more complex needs on average" than those on Kickstart. Two traps from the small print. First, this is not the Youth Jobs Grant of up to £3,000 that our August edition explained, where "you still interview and choose, but you cannot put someone you found yourself through it"; that grant's own FAQ says the young person must "not currently be eligible for the Jobs Guarantee", so one hire cannot carry both. Second, the bands count permanent employees while the guidance describes the limit as a ratio of full-time employees, so if your team is mostly part-time or casual, ask the delivery partner how they will count you before assuming you are in the band that can host up to two. And plan month seven before you say yes. Our staff turnover post is blunt about the ramp: "A new café hire is not a barista on day one. They are a barista on roughly day 60." A placement that ends at six months because the role cannot stand on its own has spent two months of your training on a job that then disappears. So cost the role as if the subsidy did not exist: put the hours, the NI category and the rate through the new hire calculator and ask whether you would still want the job at month seven. One more question for the delivery partner while you are at it: whether holiday pay sits inside the reimbursed wage, because the guidance does not say so in terms.
Read McFadden's conference speech in full on LabourList ->
Square Can Now Send Your Opening Hours to Apple Maps in the UK, and Google Says You Have Four Days to Reject Some Strangers' Edits to Yours - Two Listing Jobs Before the Clocks Go Back on 25 October
On Thursday 24 September Square announced an integration with Apple Business, live in eight countries including the UK, that lets sellers "connect their locations to Apple Business from their Square Dashboard, so they can seamlessly manage and synchronize key business location information that appears on Apple Maps". What syncs, according to Square's UK help article, is information "such as name, address, opening hours, phone number, website URL, business category and logo". It is not a switch. In the US and Canada, eligible business-verified sellers without an Apple Business account can enrol from the Square Dashboard; in the UK, unless you already have one to connect, you set up an Apple Business organisation on Apple's side first, then "Wait until Apple verifies your organisation and approves your brand, then return to Square Dashboard to connect your Apple Business organisation to Square." Apple says verifying your organisation "can take up to five working days", Apple then reviews every brand by hand, which Square says "typically takes up to 5 working days", and each location is reviewed too. After that, every change you save to a connected location's details in Square syncs across, though "data syncing to Apple, including updating your Apple Maps place card, may take 24 to 48 hours." It works on Square Free, Plus and Premium, needs a verified physical location that welcomes customers, and Square's own Order and Menu links on the place card need your Square online ordering profile switched on first.
Separately, Google added a section to its Business Profile help page. Archived copies show it appeared between 19 and 21 September, and Search Engine Roundtable reported it on 23 September. "If a suggested edit requires your review, you may receive an email or an in-product notification. Once notified, you have four days to accept or reject the suggestion." Then the sentence that matters: "If you don't respond within four days, Google may automatically publish the update if it is supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website." Two more qualifiers are Google's own and worth keeping. It applies to "certain suggested edits", and the same page says "Google may apply suggested user edits to your business information without prior review", which it says happens "in cases where edits must meet policy guidelines".
What this means for you: In August this column ran Google Maps taking food orders in the US, with the line "Nothing switches on in the UK this week". These two are smaller, and both are live in the UK now. If you run Square and want your hours right on Apple Maps, start this week rather than the night before the hours change: if you are new to Apple Business, allow two working weeks or more for Apple's checks, then 24 to 48 hours for each change to show. Square's help article describes no way to date a change in advance, so change your hours about two days before your winter hours start and check the place card afterwards. It talks about opening hours and says nothing about one-off holiday hours, so check your Christmas hours on the Apple Maps place card yourself rather than assuming they carried across. If you have a Google Business Profile, four days is shorter than a week. Our Google reviews routine is "Twenty minutes, every Monday", and that is still right for reviews, but it will not catch a suggested edit that lands on a Tuesday, which Google could publish from the Saturday if nobody answers it. So make sure Business Profile emails and notifications reach someone who reads them every day, including across a weekend. And because Google says it may apply some edits without asking you first, add one line to the Monday routine: open the profile editor and look for anything in blue, which Google says "Shows info changed by Google". Update your own website's hours on the same day you update the profile, too. Google names your website as the kind of public information that can back an edit, and on our reading, a website still showing summer hours is the kind of thing that could back a wrong one. It is close to the warning the 1 June edition gave about an AI agent rewriting your web presence, "Point it at stale data and it will confidently publish the wrong prices, the wrong opening hours, and last summer's menu", arriving through Google's own edit queue instead. The clocks go back on Sunday 25 October. Get both jobs done before then.
Read Google's help page on suggested edits ->
The Brikly Take
Five stories, and in each one something that used to sit with you passes through someone else's system. Your staff and customers pass through a CCTV software company's analysis. The payment at your counter passes through a bank's face check. Your bank's phone number can pass through a chatbot's answer. Your choice of hire passes through a jobcentre and a delivery partner. Your opening hours pass through two maps and a queue of strangers' edits. None of that is a reason to refuse the camera software, the face payment, the chatbot, the scheme or the map. Some of them will be useful. It is a reason to keep your own copy of the thing that matters and to check theirs against it: the DPIA before the first alert, your blended rate before the 0%, the number on the back of the card before the one in the answer, month seven before month one, your own hours before Google's.
Four weeks and two days to the Budget, and two consultations close this week. The check is still yours.
The Weekly Grind is published every Monday by Brikly - modular intelligence tools for independent cafe and coffee shop owners. Got a story we should cover? Get in touch ->
Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafes in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent cafe owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.