Pike Place Fish Market has been selling seafood from the same spot in Seattle’s Pike Place Market since 1930. For much of that time, it has also been sending fish through the air.
The tradition started for a practical reason. In the early days, fish were displayed out in front of the counter, while the scales and cutting boards sat farther back. Every time a customer wanted to know what a fish weighed — or decided they wanted a different one — an employee had to carry it back and forth. Former owner John Yokoyama found a faster way.
“One fateful day, Johnny was busy trying to help multiple people,” co-owner Ryan Reese recalled. “He just took a fish, looked at the guy behind the counter and said, ‘Hey kid, catch.’ He threw the fish to him so he could put it on the scale, and the rest is history.”
Today, the fish toss is part of the spectacle that draws crowds to the market, but the business itself goes well beyond the counter. Pike Place Fish Market ships fresh seafood overnight across the country, serves generations of local customers, and handles a steady flow of tourists from around the world. Its reach extends online, too. On TikTok, for example, it has over 600K followers, with some videos drawing millions of views.
“Whether you live in Florida or New York or Hawaii, you can have fresh wild fish on your porch the next day,” Reese explained.
In 2018, Reese and three fellow longtime fishmongers bought the business from Yokoyama. They knew the operation inside out, and they also knew there were parts of it that could be improved. When the financing arrangement that had tied the business to its previous payments provider came to an end, the new owners had an opportunity to reconsider the tools behind the operation.
The challenge: Modernizing without getting in the way
For years, Pike Place Fish Market did not have much reason to rethink its payments setup. The business used the payment processing services required by the bank that financed the purchase of the business, so changing systems was not really on the table. Once that debt matured, the owners were finally free to look at other options.
The business was still, in many ways, an intentionally old-school operation.
“We don’t use a point-of-sale machine. We have a cash register,” Reese said. “Everything people are buying, we add up by hand on a piece of paper.”
The hands-on approach is part of how the business works, but it’s by no means a slow-moving operation. During peak cruise season, four ships can dock nearby at once, sending thousands of passengers into the area. Inside the market, the team is weighing fish, cutting orders, answering questions, ringing up customers, and, occasionally, sending a salmon flying overhead.
In that environment, even small inefficiencies can add up quickly. Prices change frequently and new products come in regularly, so the team needs to be able to keep what it is selling up to date without slowing down the customers standing in front of them.
The owners were not looking to replace the way the fishmongers worked. They wanted tools that could support their workflow without adding unnecessary complexity.
The right fit had to be easy for the crew to pick up, fast enough for a packed counter, and backed by people the owners felt comfortable calling if something went wrong.
The solution: A better tool for the way they work
When Pike Place Fish Market started looking at new options, Square stood out for a couple of reasons.
The first was the relationship with the Square team.
“I really felt comfortable,” Reese said. “The Square folks that were coming down here and trying to earn our business, they were down here frequently.” With other providers, he said, “I was just a number.” With Square, he felt he had people he could reach when an issue came up. “For us, that was the most important thing.”
The technology also fit naturally into the way the business already operated. Square allowed the team to try new features without forcing them to abandon the hands-on processes they still preferred.
“There’s some great features that weren’t previously available to us,” Reese said. The team can take the totals they add up by hand and enter them into Square to double-check the math before completing the transaction. “That makes life easier for us.”
Getting the crew up to speed was similarly straightforward. Pike Place Fish Market has 25 full-time employees, many of them in their 20s and 30s.
“Most of our staff is pretty tech-savvy even though we’re just fishmongers,” Reese said. “The Square device that we use almost just felt like second nature to them. There was really not much of a big learning curve at all.”
The team uses Square Terminal, a compact, all-in-one payment device designed to handle card payments and point-of-sale tasks without taking up much counter space. With a built-in battery, it can also be used cordlessly throughout the day.
The impact: More speed, less busywork
For Pike Place Fish Market, the clearest impact has been speed.
“There’s some speed factor that makes it easier for our staff to change prices and keep products up to date,” Reese said. “Which in turn just leads to faster in-and-out speed for the customer.”
That means less time spent on the mechanics of a sale and more time focused on the people standing at the counter.
The next opportunity is marketing. One of the biggest surprises for Reese has been seeing how much customer information is available through Square. For example, Square Customer Directory automatically builds customer profiles from transactions and can track details such as purchase history and repeat visits.
Pike Place Fish Market has never made a habit of asking every customer for an email address or phone number, so having that data available with little extra effort creates a new way to reconnect with people who have already shopped there.
“Being able to market to people that have actually shopped here before, that’s low-hanging fruit,” Reese said. “Somebody that’s been here and spent money here, that’s exactly who you want to go after to try to get them to come back.”
With Square Marketing, businesses can send one-time or automated email and text campaigns to groups such as new, regular, or lapsed customers. For Pike Place Fish Market, that could eventually mean reconnecting with past shoppers through seasonal updates or targeted offers.
The business is still early in that process, but Reese sees plenty of room to grow. For now, the team is taking a measured approach to what comes next. Along with marketing, Pike Place Fish Market is considering more point-of-sale and inventory management capabilities from Square, adding new tools as they make sense for the business.
“We want to try to slowly integrate some of those solutions and try them out over time,” Reese explained.
For a business approaching a century in the same spot, there is little reason to reinvent what already works. The opportunity is to make the operation faster and easier where it counts — and give the team more ways to turn a memorable visit into a lasting customer relationship.
