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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of when the entire Swiss train network shut down in 2005[0]

This was, however, not due to a computer glitch, but problems in SBB's electrical grid, which lead to overload of some of the lines and then to a complete shutdown of the entire grid.

Warnings were displayed on control consoles, but were drowned in 1000s of other meaningless warnings (there's a lesson for an UI designer here).

I was in the ICE from Basel to Zurich at the time and after fuming for a few minutes I figured: "What can you do?" and moved to the bar wagon. There we had something of an impromptu party until there was no more power for the cash register and they stopped sales.

In the end it was a (relatively) funny adventure for most and a huge embarrassment for SBB. I don't think they like to be reminded of that faithful day.

[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-train-network-shuts-down/...

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> There we had something of an impromptu party until there was no more power for the cash register and they stopped sales.

Funny how the entire system has ground to a halt and the bartender is still worried that their cash register receipts and inventory won’t reconcile and shuts that part down too.

I’m puzzled by the lack of resilience in retail sales. I thought “always be closing” was supposed to apply to all types of sales. A receipt pad and a credit card imprinter under the counter would be a very cheap backup. It would be slow, but at least they would be closing.

It can even be considered a national security issue in the case of food, medicines and other vital services.

This is Europe. Credit card imprinters are rare if they were ever used at all. I've never seen one.

The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a backup in place in an increasingly interconnected world where a glitch can take out any nationwide system.

Even for a cash payment the register still needs to work for the payment to be... well, registered as a sale. You need to get a receipt with tax paid, and all that.

That's easily done with a writing pad with carbon paper between each sheet. You write the items, prices and tax, rip off one sheet to give to the customer and another sheet for the books. I checked, these seem to still be sold at office supply places, so there is no excuse.

Not sure about the Netherlands, but that's illegal in some parts. There are laws that sales MUST be recorded electronically.

Cash invoices will probably still work in most jurisdictions, to be recorded electronically after the fact. It's even more work than a handwritten receipt since the customer would have to be identified, not just what is being sold and for how much, so I wouldn't fault a merchant for taking out a service surcharge for it.

Most credit or debit cards support offline transactions, so a shop can keep a battery powered terminal that reconciles when it comes online.

Imprinters don't exist in Europe to my knowledge - the first time I saw one was on a visit to NYC a few years ago and I thought they were pranking me.

There are a lot of different cultural practices in Europe, and unification is a slow process. I for one have seen many imprinters in use in Europe, although it has been years since I last saw one. An online terminal used to be significantly more expensive than an imprinter, so small shops would prefer the imprinter, especially in rural locations with bad connectivity.

My employer has (or had) one. They used it a couple of years ago when they sold some stuff to staff (old furniture etc).

The usual fraud risks don't really apply in this case. Other than that, it must be over 20 years since I saw my parents pay using one, and that was unusual enough that I remember it.

> Most credit or debit cards support offline transactions, so a shop can keep a battery powered terminal that reconciles when it comes online.

Almost....

Its been a while since I have been involved in POS payments, but IIRC there is a clear protocol which goes something like this:

     1. If the card machine is online and working, use that
     2. If the card machine is not working *AND* the business is willing to take on the risk, record an offline transaction for later reconciliation
     3. If the card machine is not working *AND* the business *IS NOT* willing to take on the risk, call bank $phone_number for manual transaction validation and record the validation code provided at the end of the call.

4. If the card machine is not working and your business requires automated immediate finalisation of payment, refuse all cards altogether

I'm in Europe too, and I have never seen an imprinter either, but I keep being issued cards with embossed numbers, so I figure they must be good for something, if not imprinting, what else?

I'm concerned about the phasing out of cash too as a separate issue, I just don't think the cashless options should have to be subject to artificial limitations like requiring electricity or a network connection to be able to be used. I guess online transactions with chip and pin are much more secure and should be the default, but retailers could keep a log of outages that they are required to submit along with the imprinted slips. They could be corroborated with the logs of the utility companies as well as other businesses in the area, and if something doesn't make sense it could trigger an audit.

Some EU countries don't issue credit/debit cards by default but they have their own system. The Netherlands is one of them. Such cards don't have embossing. You can get a MasterCard/Visa compatible card but it's not standard, though I believe this will change soon.

But of course the imprinting system is ancient and extremely prone to fraud. As is the magstripe. I wish we had a choice not to have the latter anymore. I'd gladly give up the ability to pay in places where magstripes are still used in return for more security against skimming. Here in Europe the magstripe is just not used anymore except for supporting foreign cards.

The Dutch debit cards are Maestro (Mastercard) or V Pay (Visa) cards which are a pretty standard systems. There is no point in embossing because transactions need to be authorized immediately by the issuing bank for obvious reasons.

They are pretty standard but not accepted where credit cards normally are. In particular Maestro, I'm not sure about V Pay as I've never had it.

But when I lived in the Netherlands I had to get a credit card to do stuff like book flights or order on foreign sites.

They are pretty non-standard as they don't display a number that can be used where credit card numbers are normally accepted (they do have such a number internally to work with the Maestro/V-Pay system).

My lastest debit card (issued last year) was the first one I got without embossed numbers. I guess retrocompatibility is no longer a priority. Not that it changes anything for me, virtually every shop has already phased out even the magstripes and use either chip cards or NFCs.

I like the embossing because it gives my thumb something to grip when I'm pulling the card out of my wallet.

I've seen an imprinter used in Germany I think, but that was more than 30 years ago.

My one and only chance to use a card imprinter was on a train from London to York. It was the first time that I realized why the embossing exist

I am in Europe as well, but I am probably older than you, so I actually have seen the imprinters in Denmark.

However, that was probably 20+ years ago. :)

Same in Norway. I used to go out for beers to this one bar that had an imprinter when my bank account were empty in the early 2000s. good times.

UK too, which is arguably still part of Europe. I remember them being used at less professionally organised events (street parties, church outings etc.).

We had one at work as well 15 years ago as part of a contingency strategy in case of a power outage, but don't remember it ever being used. I left retail so no idea if they still have it.

We did have them in the 1990s. But my most recent debit card is no longer embossed

I have some experience related to cash/registers/POS.

Card imprinters did exist in Europe (Italy) just fine, but they are not used since (at least) thirty years.

Most cards that are presented to the cash now have no embossed numbers (most people have the national payment circuit called Bancomat/Pagobancomat, sometimes coupled - on the same not-embossed card - with a Visa or Mastercard debit).

So in 99% of cases there is no way to "extract" money from cards without using the card reader and if electricity or landline/internet connection are down, it is a problem, though there are a number of battery powered and GSM/cellular connected POS/terminals that may give a few hours of autonomy.

Since several years sales to the public MUST be recorded on an electronic cash register[1], there is something like a "special emergency exception" where you can annotate manually on a paper registry sales, but as often happens the exact procedure is not largely known and I believe most people would not risk a (hefty) fine should they do any mistake in these cases and prefer to close the shop.

[1] which is BTW connected via internet to the Agenzia delle Entrate, the governement agency that deals with taxes, and data from the cash register is transmitted daily to them automatically, though there is a few days time tolerance in case of connection issues

Hmm, the last time I heard of one being used in the UK I can track to a date in 2002. My uncle bought a commuter from Dan Computers the day they went bust. The credit readers stopped working, because the credit company pulled access; but the retail staff did not realise this, so they broke out the imprint machines and kept going. Presumably the receiver didn't notice the flimsies, because they never either finally got the payment processed through the banks, nor tried to collect the payment any other way.

Originally they were the main means of taking card payments in the UK, though.

> So in 99% of cases there is no way to "extract" money from cards without [...]

The card has the customer's IBAN, which you can use along with their ID and have them sign a contract to allow you to deduct the purchase via direct debit, the system is routinely used for point of sale, but is mostly known for regular recurring billing.

It's too much of a hassle and deviation from standard business practices for shops to use it in practice, so they just wait until the network is up.

But it's not because there's "no way", embossed cards were a hassle too. We've just gotten used to less manual paperwork.

>The card has the customer's IBAN

No, not really, most cards have an "own" number, not connected to the IBAN (though a few do have it), it depends on the bank or organization issuing the card and on the specific type of card, I would say (without any proof of it) that the ratio is maybe 80% without IBAN and 20% with IBAN.

And pre-paid cards are also very common, without a connection you have no way to know if the money is there.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure IBAN is universal (or almost so) for all EU bank accounts at this point. Thus consumer debit cards have in IBAN associated with them.

Now, it may not be the fully formatted ISO IBAN number, but some shorter variant you need to prefix with e.g. the country's IBAN prefix. E.g. in The Netherlands all Debit cards have the full number, but Iceland uses a suffixed system, those are just two systems I'm personally familiar with.

I quickly searched for what Italy's largest bank is, and found pictures of their debit cards, which seem to have 4x4 numeric digit on the front. This page then seems to explain how to convert it to IBAN: https://help.finecobank.com/it/il-conto-fineco/conto-corrent...

In any case, I was just using IBAN as a shorthand for "a unique account number suitable for a direct debit contract".

If Italy really uses proprietary bank account numbering system it's probably still true that people there can pay e.g. their electricity via direct debit, which will eventually lead back to a contract where they said such-and-such can withdraw money from such-and-such account.

The store would then print out that contract template to have on hand.

Except that they wouldn't, because you're not going to train your point-of-sale people for the 10 minutes per year the phone system is fully down, or have accounting deal with the mountain of resulting paperwork and manual one-off payment processing.

But that doesn't mean that offline payments are literally impossible if you have neither card nor credit card, it's just become so exceptional that people have forgotten how, even to the point of claiming it can't be done :)

Yes, I am sure, at least in Italy.

Some Bancomat/Pagobancomat ones (but again not all of them) are connected to the IBAN (amd they sport both the IBAN and the name of the holder).

Many Bancomat/Pagobancomat are connected to Mastercard or Visa (or Maestro) debit cards and they have "their own" number, unrelated to the IBAN (and they don't even have the name of the holder).

Some have the name of the holder, but not the IBAN.

As said it depends on the issuer, I have an account at a bank that issues the Bancomat card with the IBAN number (and my name on it and you have to wait for the card by mail for replacement), have another two accounts in two different banks where you can go to the teller, and he/she fishes a new card from a drawer and "couples" it to your account, the card is "blank", no name, nor IBAN, just the card number.

Fineco is I believe third or fourth bank in size, the two largest ones should be Unicredit (which casually is the one from which I have the IBAN connected card) and Intesa san Paolo (which is one of the two I have the "unconnected" card from).

My current experience is with some 30 payments daily, or 200 per week.

I would say that (from memory and very roughly) what happens here:

American Express or other "real" credit card: 2-10

Other embossed numbers credit or debit cards: 25-30

Bancomat/PagoBancomat (some with IBAN, many without): 90-100

Not embossed number Visa/Mastercard (as said sometimes they are the same as the Bancomat ones): 40-50

Prepaid or similar (not embossed numbers): 20-50

Aside: in case that's an eggcorn and not a typo, the day would be "fateful", as in, something momentous happened, rather than "faithful", showing loyalty.

Thanks!

Not a native English speaker. So it's easy for me to confuse the terms. You're right, of course.

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