Toast — Local services in Boston

Lots to unpack here. I’ll start with the beginning.

Have had a gift card integration since like 2018, with no issues. All of a sudden, about a month after Christmas, gift cards stopped working. Couldn’t check balances/sell cards/redeem gift cards. Reached out to Toast who pointed the finger at the third party integration. Third party integration pointed the finger right back. Spent like 15-20hrs between support for both companies and after almost a full month the gift cards worked again for like 2 hours then stopped working. Waited another few days and finally they worked again. Asked for a refund from the integration department, not a credit. If you charge for something that doesn’t work you should refund the money and feel the financial pain of your ineptitude, not credit the account that you charged for a system that doesn’t work. Never got a response about the outage, the reason for the outage or a refund.

Simultaneously, was opening an additional location for my current company so I reached out to Sales, and was set up with a local rep. She seemed great at first, helping me through the process of “applying” for a new location. Part of this “application” was paying for the terminal over the first 180 days, minus a deposit. She worked to get the system sent quickly, and I was happy with the service. The onboarding call was easy enough as I waited for my new POS terminal to arrive. The following week I received a notification that my account would be charged for the full amount of the pos system. Confused, I reached out to my sales rep who said she would look into it. Shockingly I never heard back. I reached out multiple times via phone, email and text and still haven’t received a response as to why I was charged in full. I would love to say this was the end of the issue, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

Upon installing the new system I realized that the system was not accepting credit/debit/gift cards as payment. Considering it’s 2024, and 90% of payments are via electronic methods, I reached out to Toast support. For multiple hours, on multiple days, I was instructed to run test after test and finally told that I would be sent replacement credit card processing hardware. Four days later, after installing new hardware, still no ability to process electronic payments. Another day of testing with support and finally convinced one of the onboarding associates to send me a new terminal. Start to finish on this process is about 3 weeks at this point. New terminal received and processed cards immediately, meaning the original terminal was a lemon.

So the long and short of my current experience with Toast is this:

Their updates are full of bugs. Glitches have occurred with online ordering lately including offering guests delivery even though we don’t offer delivery.

Any integration can all of a sudden stop working, even if it has functioned for years and you’ll still need to pay for it no matter what it costs your business in the eyes of your customers or no matter how much time you spent working to fix it.

If you order brand new hardware, there’s a solid chance it won’t work, you’ll be shamed as an idiot for it, and the fix can and will take multiple weeks to get to the bottom of.

Sales reps will charge your account whether or not you agreed to the charge and then ghost you and not even bother to respond

Toast used to be awesome. It does not seem to be the case anymore. There’s no accountability. Their support treats people like they are idiots. I grew up on computers and know computers only do what they are told, so if something stops working it’s because the computer program was told to stop working.

I used to suggest Toast to anyone looking for a POS system. Moving forward, I wouldn’t...

DO NOT USE TOAST! One of the most important thing to any restaurant is their menu. Being able to have a software that is easily editable and manageable is so important. As a restaurant owner, I need efficiency. My time is important.

Imagine having customers come in to pick up orders they placed online which your restaurant never received, while at the same time your cashier is on the phone with Toast for over an hour because the menu is messed up and it’s too hard to figure out how to add or take away a modifier group, while the hostess/waitress is trying to figure out why she can’t print out the customers bill, while the back of the house is waiting for tickets to print but there’s a server error so no tickets are printing. THIS HAPPENED ALL IN ONE DAY AND IT HAPPENED SEVERAL TIMES.

I tried to get my sales rep to help me. He responded NEVER. I called customer service so many times before I finally said forget this! I paid thousands for this equipment and $286 a month for a service that I cannot use! I asked customer service to cancel my account and to return the equipment which they were supposed to honor. This was after I called to speak with my sales rep, onboarding rep and onboarding manager who were ALL laid off because of COVID. I tried to give them the benefit of doubt because Of COVID. However, when I get on the line with customer service because my system is going crazy and my menu isn’t showing properly, and the customer service rep laughs out loud and when asked what are you laughing about he replies, “Oh something I’m reading on Google”, it’s time to take my leave. It would be so different if when you did have a problem it was resolved immediately.

They passed my account to someone in the upper tier who was supposed to call me back. Customer service doesn’t have the authority to cancel my service. So now I’m waiting for the wizard of Oz in tier 2 to call me back to cancel my service and refund me foe this useless equipment...SINCE AUGUST. I have been paying $286 a month and still haven’t heard back from the wizard in tier 2! I am BEYOND frustrated. I called again today and once again I am waiting for the WOO in tier 2 to call me back.

If I could give TOAST a 0 or a negative score I would. They have grossly mismanaged my business. I will be taking this to the BBB and attorney general if they do not return my funds.

I ended up in restaurant depot one day and saw some advertisement for Clover. I did the demo and COULD NOT BELIEVE how much I allowed myself and my staff to suffer with Toast! Clover even made my website AND manages my Google listing AND, has a relationship with Door Dash and Postmates so the fee is 12.5% instead of 30% for delivery. I’m never on hold for long and the best part was I didn’t have to pay upfront for my equipment! Not advertising for Clover, I’m simply saying, there are better options!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! You will be highly disappointed. Do...

We were trying to love Toast, and did not want to post a negative review before trying to resolve our issues with Toast first. We are restaurant owners and know what it is like to be able to be given the chance to fix problems first before reviews are posted. But we have tried and tried and cannot get Toast to resolve our issues. If we do get resolution for our issues, we will revise this review, as there are other features we really like. However, these other nice features are in vain with our connectivity issues that are crippling our daily operations.

We have offline issues, hundreds of times each day. We have contacted Toast support about this numerous times for the past month and a half and have no resolution to date. We contacted our implementation manager and we were just told to contact Toast support. It’s a vicious circle.

We are not able to talk to anyone in the company who can actually help us. We are told each time we call that someone has been assigned to our case. However, we never hear back from Toast. We have to call them to check the status our case. We were told a network specialist would come to our business to see why we are having the issues, but no one has come and no one can seem to tell us when one will be coming.

Support is really not 24/7. On weekends, we have to leave a message and we have NEVER gotten a return phone call from a message that was left. We always have to call Toast back.

We had another issue with Toast when the whole system was down and we called support and actually got laughed at by the rep due to the issues were having during a busy dinner rush. We certainly did not think it was funny that our customers and employees had a terrible experience that night due to our POS system.

The Toast service has not worked for us as advertised at all. We were very excited about switching to Toast, and I was one of their biggest cheerleaders at my company for choosing Toast over other companies we researched. Now I wish I hadn’t been. The reporting and timekeeping features are wonderful, and we love, love them. But we are to the point that they are not worth the headache of not being able actually use the system as designed and are considering going back either to our old vendor or a...