7 ms·

Currently standing in a half closed supermarket because the tills are down and they cant take payments

by Jamie452 11mo ago

SoftTalker 11mo ago
Mind-boggling that any retailer would not have the capability to at least run the checkout stations offline.
- withinboredom 11mo ago
  I knew an old guy in the '00s who specialized in cobal/fortran for working on tiller software. Guess he retired and they couldn't maintain it
  - computerdork 11mo ago
    Anyone remember Bob's number?? Bob?! Oh the humanity! We're all gonna be canned!
- tcmart14 11mo ago
  You can, but it's all about risk mitigation. Most processors have some form of store and forward (and it can have limitations like only X number of transactions). Some even have controls to limit the amount you can store-and-forward (for instance, only charges under $50). But ultimately, it's still risk mitigation. You can store-and-forward, but you're trusting that the card/account has the funds. If it doesn't, you loose and ain't shit you can do about it. If you can't tolerate any risk, you don't turn on store and forward systems and then you can't process cards offline. Its not the we are not capable. Its, is the business willing to assume the risk?
- bombcar 11mo ago
  Most retailers trust their cashiers a bit less than they trust the customers. They'd rather shut down during a power/Internet failure than give any autonomy to the worker drones.
chasd00 11mo ago
There's a Family Dollar by my house that is down at least 2 full days per month because of bad inet connectivity. I live close enough that with a small tower on my roof i can get line of sight to theirs. I've thought about offering them a backup link off my home inet if they give me 50% of sales whenever its in use. It would be a pretty good deal for them, better some sales when their inet is down vs none.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged. Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card readers in the back that they can resuscitate for a few days until the technology is turned back on? Did they throw them all away?
  - ElevenLathe 11mo ago
    The kachunk-kachunk credit card machines need raised digits on the cards, and I don't think most banks have been issuing those for years at this point. Mine have been smooth for at least 10 years.
    - xboxnolifes 11mo ago
      It's hit or miss. My (brand new) bank card and chase credit card are raised. But my other credit cards are flat.
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
      > kachunk-kachunk credit card machines How aptly descriptive.
    - progmetaldev 11mo ago
      My card tied to my main financial institution have the raised digits, but most cards you'd sign up for online now no longer have the raised digits (and often allow you to select art to appear on the card face).
david422 11mo ago
IIRC, the grocery chain I worked for used to have an offline mode to move customers out the door. But it meant that when the system came back online, if the customers card was denied, the customer got free groceries.
- cyberax 11mo ago
  I remember that banks will try to honor the transactions, even if the customer's balance/credit limit is exhausted. It doesn't apply only to some gift cards.
- tcmart14 11mo ago
  Yea, good old store and forward. We implemented it in our PoS system. Now, we do non PCI integrations so we arn't in PCI scope, but depending on the processor, it can come with some limitations. Like, you can do store and forward, but only up to X number of transactions. I think for one integration, it's 500-ish store wide (it uses a local gateway that store and forwards to the processors gateway). The other integration we have, its 250, but store and forward on device, per device.
  - fy20 11mo ago
    In many places it's also possibly just a left over feature from older times. I worked at a major UK supermarket in the mid-00s, and their checkout system had this feature. But it was like that because that's how it was originally built, it wasn't a 'feature' they added. Credit card information would be recorded by the POS, synced to a mini-server in the back office (using store-and-forward to handle network issues) and then in a batch process overnight, sent to HQ where the payment was processed. It wasn't until chip-and-PIN was rolled out that they started supporting "online" (i.e. processed then and there) card transactions, and even then the old method still worked if there was a network issues or power failure (all POSes has their own UPS). The only real risk at the time was that someone tried to pay with a cancelled credit card - the bank would always honour the payment otherwise. But that was pretty uncommon back then, as you'd have to phone your bank to do it, not just press a button in an app.
- onionisafruit 11mo ago
pndy 11mo ago
I remember last mechanical cash registers in my country in 90s and when these got replaced by early electronic ones with blue vacuum fluorescent tubes. Then everything got smaller and smaller. Now I'm pestered to "add the item to the cart" by software. Last week I couldn't pay for flowers for grandma's grave because smartphone-sized card terminal refused to work - it stuck on charging-booting loop so I had to get cash. Tho my partner thinks she actually wanted to get cash without a receipt for herself excluding taxes
Jamie452 11mo ago
Just to add - this particular supermarket wasn’t fully down, it took ages for them to press “sub total” and then pick the payment method. I suspect it was slow waiting for a request to timeout perhaps
reaperducer 11mo ago
Currently standing in a half closed supermarket because the tills are down and they cant take payments There's a fairly large supermarket near me that has both kinds of outages. Occasionally it can't take cards because the (fiber? cable?) internet is down, so it's cash only. Occasionally it can't take cash because the safe has its own cellular connection, and the cell tower is down. I was at Frank's Pizza in downtown Houston a few weeks ago and they were giving slices of pizza away because the POS terminal died, and nobody knew enough math to take cash. I tried to give them a $10 and told them to keep the change, but "keep the change" is an unknown phrase these days. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around it. But hey, free pizza!
thisOtterBeGood 11mo ago
In Germany many stores still accept cash and some even only accept cash and we are ridiculed for this... Seems like one of the rare instances where this is useful :D
- bombcar 11mo ago
  It's sad the number of stores I've seen where they just shut down when they can't use the checkout machines; the clerks aren't allowed to do math even if they could. Whereas the smaller, owner-run stores have more leeway; the local tiny grocery "sold" all freezer/refrigerator food for cheap/free during a power failure. The big Walmart closed and threw everything away the next day.
  - hinkley 11mo ago
    The odd thing is that the US has been teaching math using the “in your head” heuristic (New Math) for almost 20 years and yet young adults cannot make change without the machine to save their lives. God help me if I hand someone $25 for a $14.75 total. I’m getting small bills back. I wonder what they teach in Germany.
the_black_hand 11mo ago
why tf would a supermarket depend on Azure? Payment processing isn't their thing

Currently standing in a half closed supermarket because the tills are down and they cant take payments

SoftTalker 11mo ago

Mind-boggling that any retailer would not have the capability to at least run the checkout stations offline.

withinboredom 11mo ago
I knew an old guy in the '00s who specialized in cobal/fortran for working on tiller software. Guess he retired and they couldn't maintain it
- computerdork 11mo ago
  Anyone remember Bob's number?? Bob?! Oh the humanity! We're all gonna be canned!
tcmart14 11mo ago
You can, but it's all about risk mitigation. Most processors have some form of store and forward (and it can have limitations like only X number of transactions). Some even have controls to limit the amount you can store-and-forward (for instance, only charges under $50). But ultimately, it's still risk mitigation. You can store-and-forward, but you're trusting that the card/account has the funds. If it doesn't, you loose and ain't shit you can do about it. If you can't tolerate any risk, you don't turn on store and forward systems and then you can't process cards offline. Its not the we are not capable. Its, is the business willing to assume the risk?
bombcar 11mo ago
Most retailers trust their cashiers a bit less than they trust the customers. They'd rather shut down during a power/Internet failure than give any autonomy to the worker drones.

chasd00 11mo ago

There's a Family Dollar by my house that is down at least 2 full days per month because of bad inet connectivity. I live close enough that with a small tower on my roof i can get line of sight to theirs. I've thought about offering them a backup link off my home inet if they give me 50% of sales whenever its in use. It would be a pretty good deal for them, better some sales when their inet is down vs none.

ryandrake 11mo ago
You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged. Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card readers in the back that they can resuscitate for a few days until the technology is turned back on? Did they throw them all away?
- ElevenLathe 11mo ago
  The kachunk-kachunk credit card machines need raised digits on the cards, and I don't think most banks have been issuing those for years at this point. Mine have been smooth for at least 10 years.
  - xboxnolifes 11mo ago
    It's hit or miss. My (brand new) bank card and chase credit card are raised. But my other credit cards are flat.
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    > kachunk-kachunk credit card machines How aptly descriptive.
  - progmetaldev 11mo ago
    My card tied to my main financial institution have the raised digits, but most cards you'd sign up for online now no longer have the raised digits (and often allow you to select art to appear on the card face).

david422 11mo ago

IIRC, the grocery chain I worked for used to have an offline mode to move customers out the door. But it meant that when the system came back online, if the customers card was denied, the customer got free groceries.

cyberax 11mo ago
I remember that banks will try to honor the transactions, even if the customer's balance/credit limit is exhausted. It doesn't apply only to some gift cards.
tcmart14 11mo ago
Yea, good old store and forward. We implemented it in our PoS system. Now, we do non PCI integrations so we arn't in PCI scope, but depending on the processor, it can come with some limitations. Like, you can do store and forward, but only up to X number of transactions. I think for one integration, it's 500-ish store wide (it uses a local gateway that store and forwards to the processors gateway). The other integration we have, its 250, but store and forward on device, per device.
- fy20 11mo ago
  In many places it's also possibly just a left over feature from older times. I worked at a major UK supermarket in the mid-00s, and their checkout system had this feature. But it was like that because that's how it was originally built, it wasn't a 'feature' they added. Credit card information would be recorded by the POS, synced to a mini-server in the back office (using store-and-forward to handle network issues) and then in a batch process overnight, sent to HQ where the payment was processed. It wasn't until chip-and-PIN was rolled out that they started supporting "online" (i.e. processed then and there) card transactions, and even then the old method still worked if there was a network issues or power failure (all POSes has their own UPS). The only real risk at the time was that someone tried to pay with a cancelled credit card - the bank would always honour the payment otherwise. But that was pretty uncommon back then, as you'd have to phone your bank to do it, not just press a button in an app.
onionisafruit 11mo ago

pndy 11mo ago

I remember last mechanical cash registers in my country in 90s and when these got replaced by early electronic ones with blue vacuum fluorescent tubes. Then everything got smaller and smaller. Now I'm pestered to "add the item to the cart" by software. Last week I couldn't pay for flowers for grandma's grave because smartphone-sized card terminal refused to work - it stuck on charging-booting loop so I had to get cash. Tho my partner thinks she actually wanted to get cash without a receipt for herself excluding taxes

Jamie452 11mo ago

Just to add - this particular supermarket wasn’t fully down, it took ages for them to press “sub total” and then pick the payment method. I suspect it was slow waiting for a request to timeout perhaps

reaperducer 11mo ago

Currently standing in a half closed supermarket because the tills are down and they cant take payments There's a fairly large supermarket near me that has both kinds of outages. Occasionally it can't take cards because the (fiber? cable?) internet is down, so it's cash only. Occasionally it can't take cash because the safe has its own cellular connection, and the cell tower is down. I was at Frank's Pizza in downtown Houston a few weeks ago and they were giving slices of pizza away because the POS terminal died, and nobody knew enough math to take cash. I tried to give them a $10 and told them to keep the change, but "keep the change" is an unknown phrase these days. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around it. But hey, free pizza!

thisOtterBeGood 11mo ago

In Germany many stores still accept cash and some even only accept cash and we are ridiculed for this... Seems like one of the rare instances where this is useful :D

bombcar 11mo ago
It's sad the number of stores I've seen where they just shut down when they can't use the checkout machines; the clerks aren't allowed to do math even if they could. Whereas the smaller, owner-run stores have more leeway; the local tiny grocery "sold" all freezer/refrigerator food for cheap/free during a power failure. The big Walmart closed and threw everything away the next day.
- hinkley 11mo ago
  The odd thing is that the US has been teaching math using the “in your head” heuristic (New Math) for almost 20 years and yet young adults cannot make change without the machine to save their lives. God help me if I hand someone $25 for a $14.75 total. I’m getting small bills back. I wonder what they teach in Germany.

the_black_hand 11mo ago

why tf would a supermarket depend on Azure? Payment processing isn't their thing