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?

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BenjiWiebe 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think a lot of payment terminals have an option to record transactions offline and upload them later, but apparently it's not enabled by default - probably because it increases your risk that someone pays with a bad card.

	▲	hinkley 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		After having my credit card locked by stupid fraud prevention algorithms on my honeymoon, I had a long chat with them before going overseas a second time. And that was the day Visa had a full on outage. We would walk into one shop, try to buy stuff, get declined, then go into the next and get accepted because they were running in offline mode. Got a nice big bill from my cellphone carrier for making the call to visa to ask them wtf as well.

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ElevenLathe 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	progmetaldev 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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).
	▲	hinkley 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		My credit union has been behind for a while. I think I had an embossed one until about nine years ago. Six at the latest. Still doesn’t have NFC in it.
	▲	rkomorn 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> kachunk-kachunk credit card machines How aptly descriptive.
	▲	xboxnolifes 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's hit or miss. My (brand new) bank card and chase credit card are raised. But my other credit cards are flat.

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voidmain0001 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they used standalone merchant terminals, then those typically use the local LAN which can rollover to cellular or PoT in the event of a network outage. The store can process a card transaction with the merchant terminal and then reconcile with the end of day chit. This article from 2008 describes their PoS https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/store-operations/ca...

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Finnucane 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then they would need to get the little booklets of invalid numbers to keep by the register to check (yes, I am old).

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5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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Spooky23 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s family dollar. They don’t care about customer satisfaction and the cost of reliability is cost.

The stores are in the hood or middle of nowhere. The customers don’t have many options.

	▲	progmetaldev 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		These stores appear everywhere, even in areas with high income. You'd be surprised, but often people with those high incomes shop for certain products at very low rates, and that's how they keep their savings. A good example is garbage bags. Most people don't care too much about the quality of their garbage bags, unless they rip on the way to the bin.

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wat10000 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Many businesses don't lose revenue from short outages, it just gets shifted.