Mercer Island
Chamber of Commerce

Your customers have seen the sales, the giveaways, and the “something exciting is coming” posts. But there’s one hot event that is drawing in crowds across all types of business and that’s B-I-N-G-O! It’s more than just a fun game everyone can play. Give your audience a bingo card and suddenly there’s a mission. Businesses are finding creative ways to use bingo to bring people together and give them reasons to explore. The familiar format makes participation easy: fill the squares, complete a row, earn a reward. The fun comes from what you put in those squares, what people can win, and who you invite to play. You can host a lively evening or create a monthlong challenge customers complete on their own. Here are several ideas from businesses and event organizers, along with ways to adapt them for your audience. 1. Plant Bingo The prize table is growing. Literally. Plant bingo awards the winners houseplants instead of cash or generic prizes. Some businesses give the winner an option between plants, while others specific which plant is up for grabs. While others still make sure that every participant receives a plant buddy. It can be a natural partnership between a gathering space and a plant-focused business. A nursery, florist, coffee shop, or home décor store could adapt this idea. Offer easy-care plants for beginners, herbs for cooks, or unusual varieties for collectors. Between rounds, share a quick care tip so winners have a fighting chance of keeping their prizes alive. Even if you don’t sell plants, partnering with someone who does can increase both of your email lists if you make them sign-up to attend. 2. Boozy Bingo Wineries, breweries, and distilleries are giving customers another reason to pull up a chair. You can pair bingo with a featured cocktail, a food vendor, or a themed evening. A wine bar could host “Bingo and Boards” with shareable charcuterie. A brewery could partner with a neighboring restaurant for dinner delivery. Keep the game entertaining for people choosing mocktails, too. The gathering should work without anyone needing to drink alcohol to participate. If your state allows, you can give away free glasses, bottles, mixers, and booze-infused food items. Don’t forget funny booze merch. 3. Music Bingo Unlike the first two examples, this isn’t about the award but how you play. Replace called numbers with song clips. Players mark the matching song titles on their cards. Choose music your audience will recognize. A vintage shop could build an evening around the decade represented in its merchandise. A café could host an afternoon edition. You can hire an established host or entertainment company to handle the cards, music, and pacing or if you have a vivacious employee, they can play emcee (not to be confused with run DMC. See what we did there?). 4. Bingo for What You Sell Take the plant-prize concept and apply it to your own inventory. Consider a bookstore offering books, a pet store offering enrichment toys, or a kitchen shop offering gadgets and specialty ingredients. A boutique could create themed prize bundles around travel, cozy evenings, or accessories. This gives people a chance to discover products they might otherwise walk past. Introduce each prize with one useful detail: what it does, who would enjoy it, or how to use it. 5. Menu Bingo Many customers have a favorite order. They may also have absolutely no intention of changing it. A menu bingo card gives them a reason to venture beyond the usual. Sam Jones BBQ in Winterville, NC awards stamps for featured menu purchases. Completing a five-square row earns a voucher for a free sandwich combo. Your card could feature specific dishes or prompts such as: Try a seasonal special. Order a side you’ve never had. Choose a staff favorite. Come in for breakfast. Save room for a house-made dessert. Design the card around dishes you want customers to discover. Make sure several winning paths are affordable and achievable. You want to offer alternatives where dietary needs would block participation. 6. Shop-Local Bingo This is a favorite of chambers, especially around the holidays. Before you go recreating the wheel, check to see if a similar program is offered near you. If so, find out how you can be included. In most cases, the chamber hands out a bingo card that entices participants to explore local businesses and collect stickers/stamps toward prize opportunities. The card could include spaces for visiting a new shop, attending a demonstration, finding a locally made product, or stopping at a participating eatery. Businesses can contribute prizes and promote the card, spreading the work and introducing customers to one another. Mix purchases with discovery activities so participation doesn’t require a shopping spree. If your chamber doesn’t currently have one, they may be able to help you find partners and coordinate a neighborhood or communitywide version. 7. Coffee Crawl Bingo Coffee shops can give customers a reason to explore the local café scene together. Prickly Pear Coffee Co.’s coffee crawl in Nashville, Tennessee, uses bingo challenges and individual shop stamps. Limits on how many squares each shop can stamp encourage participants to visit multiple locations. You can adapt the approach for coffee, tea, pastries, or dessert shops. Squares might include trying a different brewing method, discovering a café with outdoor seating, or asking a barista for a recommendation. Spread the challenge over several weeks. Nobody needs to complete a coffee crawl in one highly caffeinated afternoon. 8. Reading Bingo Reading challenges make excellent bingo cards. Oregon City Public Library’s card includes prompts such as reading a mystery or a book with a one-word title. A bookstore could create a seasonal reading card, with staff recommendations for each square, or attending a discussion/book signing, or reading in a new genre. Offer a modest reward (maybe a beautiful bookmark) for a completed row, and something more for a black-out card. Then invite participants to a gathering where they can share discoveries. That creates a natural next visit and gives readers something to talk about. 9. Fitness and Wellness Bingo Fitness businesses are using bingo to encourage participation and variety. Workroom Pilates in San Leandro, California, describes its monthlong challenge as a combination of fitness, habits, and community. A studio could include trying a different class, attending a beginner workshop, meeting a new instructor, or completing a recovery activity. Keep multiple routes to a winning row so beginners and people with different abilities can participate. Use the card to help customers explore your offerings without turning every square into another purchase. 10. Trivia, TV, and Movie Bingo Bingo also works with entertainment themes. You can offer TV and movie bingo, holiday bingo, and custom-themed games. One adaptation is trivia bingo: put answers only on the cards and read questions aloud. Players mark a square when they identify the correct answer. A kitchen shop could use food trivia. An outdoor retailer could build questions around camping or wildlife. A local-history theme could bring several businesses together. Keep the questions accessible. Customers came for an enjoyable evening, not an exam. 12. Meet-Someone Bingo Give guests a reason to start conversations. Networking bingo uses prompts that participants complete by finding people who match them. It’s a great way to make introductions easier at events. For a customer gathering, try prompts such as “has adopted a pet,” “knows a great local hiking spot,” or “has taken one of our workshops.” These types of prompts also lend themselves to further conversation. Ask players to collect different names across a winning row. This works especially well for businesses building a community around a shared interest, including craft shops, coworking spaces, and hobby retailers. Make the Fun Work for Your Business Before designing a game card, decide what you want it to accomplish. Fill a quiet evening? Introduce new products? Encourage repeat visits? Help customers discover neighboring businesses? Build community among your customers. Additionally, you’ll want to decide if you’re hosting a Bingo Night where the game(s) is played at your location of whether it’s a challenge they complete over time. Then keep the first version manageable: Explain the rules upfront. Include dates, qualifying activities, verification, and exactly what completing a row earns. Budget the rewards. Account for staff time, supplies, hosting, and prizes. Give staff a simple explanation. They should be able to describe the game and handle cards consistently. Track the result. Compare attendance, sales, repeat visits, or featured-product purchases with your goal. Before launching, confirm the requirements that apply to your location and format, particularly if you plan to charge for play or award chance-based prizes. Start with one bingo event or short challenge. If you need a venue, prize partner, or neighboring businesses to join you, contact the chamber. Tell them who you’d like to meet, and they can likely help make the introduction.

Suppose a customer asks to pay for a $200 order with cryptocurrency. Can you accept it? How would you know you’ve been paid? And would $200 still be $200 by the time the money reaches your business account? You don’t need to know how to buy Bitcoin to ask those questions. They’re the same questions you probably asked when you first signed on with Stripe or any of those new payment methods: What does it cost, when do I get paid, and what happens if something goes wrong? But if you’re scratching your head wondering who’s paying in crypto and how, it’s not as far away as you think. What in the World Is Cryptocurrency? Crypto is a broad term for digital assets that can be transferred through a computer network called a blockchain. Think of a blockchain as a shared record of transactions. Instead of a bank maintaining the only record of a payment, the network records it according to its own rules. A business can use a payment service to handle much of the technical work, just as it uses a processor to accept credit cards. There’s a distinction worth knowing: Bitcoin and stablecoins serve different purposes. Bitcoin’s price can change substantially. A stablecoin, like the name suggests, is designed to maintain a steadier value, commonly by tracking the U.S. dollar. “Designed to” is the kicker. A stablecoin still depends on the company issuing it and the arrangements behind it. It isn’t the same as having dollars in your bank account. That difference helps explain why digital payments have entered the small business and government conversation. At a September 2026 House Small Business subcommittee hearing, lawmakers examined whether these tools could lower payment costs, help businesses get paid sooner, and make transactions with customers or suppliers in other countries easier. The hearing also raised the questions owners need answered about conversion, taxes, and fraud. Where Could Crypto Payments Help? Before you start writing this off as science fiction, there might be some real advantages to at least entertaining the possibilities of alternative payment methods. These include: Payment costs. If you make hundreds of small sales, processing fees add up. A digital payment option might cost less for certain transactions. Compare the full cost, though, including the provider’s fees, conversion rate, and any charge to move money into your bank account. The lowest advertised fee may not be the lowest final cost. Payment timing. Some digital asset networks operate around the clock. That could be useful if your business routinely waits for funds, particularly from international buyers. But the network’s speed is only part of the story. A payment provider may have its own processing or withdrawal schedule. Ask when the dollars will be available for payroll, inventory, or bills. Customer choice. If customers have asked to pay this way, offering the option might remove a barrier to a sale. If no one has asked and your current methods work well, the added setup may bring little benefit. Cash flow makes the timing question an important one. In the Federal Reserve Banks’ 2025 report on employer firms , 51% of respondents identified uneven cash flow as a financial challenge. Faster access to a particular payment could help some businesses, though it won’t solve the larger causes of uneven revenue or late invoices. Just like other payment methods, the decision of whether to accept crypto as payment is up to you. If you’re considering it, you should understand next steps. What Happens After a Customer Pays? What happens depends on the service you choose. One provider may convert the digital asset to dollars and send a deposit to your bank account. Another arrangement may leave your business holding the asset until you decide to convert it. Those are different decisions with different risks and recordkeeping needs. Before signing up, walk through one ordinary sale and one refund. Ask the provider: What will the customer send and what will my business receive? What’s the total cost on a sale at my typical price? When will funds reach my bank account? How are refunds handled if the asset’s price changes? What records will I receive for bookkeeping and taxes? Tax implication note: The IRS says businesses must account for the U.S. dollar value of digital assets received as payment. Selling or exchanging assets later can bring further tax reporting requirements, so review the proposed setup with your accountant before using it for regular sales. Take security seriously, too. Crypto payments generally don’t offer the familiar reversal process of a credit card payment. The FTC also warns that scammers may impersonate a supplier or other trusted contact and demand payment in cryptocurrency. Verify any unexpected request to send funds using a phone number or contact method you already know. Your Experience Belongs in the Policy Conversation This is an ongoing conversation. Federal rules for digital assets continue to develop, including rules related to payment stablecoins. Small business owners should have a say in whether those rules are understandable and workable for a company without a compliance department. That’s where your chamber can help. Tell your chamber what you’d need before considering a digital payment option. Is your concern the cost of accepting payments, the time it takes to receive them, fraud protection, or the work of keeping tax records? If you’ve tried one of these services, share what happened in practice. Your chamber can bring those examples to lawmakers and help members get straightforward answers as the rules take shape. You don’t have to be ready to accept crypto to have a useful voice in the conversation. You already know what a payment system needs to do for your business.