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.
It can even be considered a national security issue in the case of food, medicines and other vital services.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
However, that was probably 20+ years ago. :)
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.
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
Originally they were the main means of taking card payments in the UK, though.
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.
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.
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 :)
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