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Comment by Alifatisk | Hacker News Reader

This is when cash comes in handy, but we're also transitioning into a cashless society so that option will slowly be gone.

Do stores really need to be connected to the internet all the time?

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> This is when cash comes in handy, but we're also transitioning into a cashless society so that option will slowly be gone.

No, because giving money is only a part of the transaction.

> Do stores really need to be connected to the internet all the time?

Yes, they need to record transactions (in some cases live for tax purposes), update inventory, and in the case of a pharmacy also check medical files (if such a feature exists in the country in question), verify insurance information, check usage details on the specific drug, etc etc.

Some of those could be batched offline and verified when the connection is back up, but others can't.

> Do stores really need to be connected to the internet all the time?

Some of them do.

A few weeks ago, I was at a Roam Burger outlet in San Francisco whose Toast point of sale system was down due to some server-side problem. They couldn't sell me a burger. Not even for cash. I had a nice chat with the store manager, who didn't have anything else to do. Then I left and ate elsewhere.

Toast docs: "If the restaurant cannot communicate with the Toast cloud, the devices cannot communicate with each other."[1] They have a lot of outages, according to third party monitoring.[2] Their own status page doesn't show those outages.[3] But their outage history does.[4] They're "transitioning" to a system where one of the local devices can be a host for the others when not connected to the "cloud".

[1] https://doc.toasttab.com/doc/platformguide/platformOfflineMo...

[2] https://isdown.app/integrations/toast

[3] https://status-dev.toasttab.com/

[4] https://status.toasttab.com/history

Back in the day when this happened employees would simply record the transactions in a physical ledger (my fancy way of saying pen and paper) and enter them later. Why is this not possible anymore? Do you need internet access to unlock your burger ingredients and turn on the grill? I would not be surprised if the answer is unironically yes.

I feel the underlying issue with a lot of these things is that no one seems to trust anyone, so nothing can be done "outside the system". As you say, the solution for these kind of outages are easy: just write some stuff down on paper and enter it later. But good heavens, we can't let people just enter data! Every possible avenue of abuse or mistakes must be covered.

Second problem is ill-designed systems which don't take exceptions in to account. Sometimes because of the preceding reason, sometimes just "oops, we didn't think of that".

The logistics fallout is a nightmare.

Let's say you're running a 10000 store burger shop. There is an outage and all of them are offline now.

There's the sheer hassle of recording everything and everything needs to be recorded correctly for compliance. Not only does it need to be recorded, but now it needs to be manually inputted back in correctly as well.

Let's say you could do that. More & more stores are getting rid of their fronting staff for the Kiosk systems. The store won't even have the capacity to keep up.

Now you've got boatloads of cash sitting in these stores that far exceed what normally would be there. Target for robbery.

If you pencil all the orders how will the fulfillment systems know when to ship you replacements and of what? Now reconciliation needs to happen across all of them to make sure they're properly stocked.

> Let's say you're running a 10000 store burger shop. There is an outage and all of them are offline now.

That happened to McDonalds on March 23, 2024.[1] Outlets in UK, Australia, Japan, Thailand were down for hours. Burger sales stopped at most locations.

No backup plan. Unlike Waffle House.[2]

This is a serious issue for disaster preparedness. The Waffle House CEO tries to get other key businesses to prep more. He says that if you can keep the Waffle House, the Walgreens, and the WalMart open after a disaster, the community comes back fast.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68573106

[2] https://www.hrdive.com/news/waffle-house-serves-up-emergency...

Do they even have enough pen and paper at shops? And somebody that can use them in the right way to keep track of the transactions and make sense of them again later on.

So how did this work before the Internet was commonplace?

> Some of those could be batched offline and verified when the connection is back up, but others can't.

That feels like someone decided that implementing a resilient business continuity plan wasn't worth it (which it may as well be, the impact is great but the likelihood low), e.g. manually making phone calls to verify the needed information, having backup paper copies of documents and so on.

Pre–internet, depending on the size of the store and retail chain, your cash registers might tie to a local small system which in turn talked to a central mainframe (IBM, Dec, Unisys, etc) using APPC over SNA, or TCP/IP, or Decnet, or whatever Unisys used. Leased lines were not particularly fast, but did not need to be, you’re talking less than a megabyte of data at most per day.

Before internet was commonplace you would have to go to a doctor and get a paper prescription which was sometimes done on a paper with watermarks and verification was that this piece of paper has a stamp or a seal on it and doctor's signature.

There were more forgeries with paper prescription than there is with online system.

Are there provinces with electronic prescriptions? I always get a piece of paper (in Alberta).

I've had cases where the pharmacy (indeed London Drugs) phoned the doctor to ask them to fax a renewal.

In Ontario my doctor sends prescriptions "electronically". In practice it's not clear whether this is like an email, or whether someone behind the scenes prints out the prescription and faxes it. Apparently the local clinic has a team that is solely responsible for faxing things on behalf of the doctors.

Here in europe it is a government database where all the clinics and pharmacies are connected to, so doctor essentially creates a record in the database.

When you visit pharmacy they ask for id and enter your id number system shows them all your active prescriptions and past ones as well, which sometimes helps when your prescription is not renewed for some reason they can give you a week supply while you sort it out.

That depends on the country. In France it varies by doctor, some will use Doctolib (a great third party private company that does appointment scheduling, video consultations and digital prescriptions) which allows you to have a digital prescription that you click on a button in the app/website to share with a specific pharmacy, and when you get there they just get your social security card and... then print out your prescription, and scan and print on it how and when was it fulfilled. Others just give you an old fashioned hand written note, or print an A4 sheet of paper.

Alberta is pretty close to being electronic.

That makes sense given the shift to electronic records that has happened in the last few years, but obviously not a factorwith this incident.

You can still ask and get those AFAIK.

>That feels like someone decided that implementing a resilient business continuity plan wasn't worth it (which it may as well be, the impact is great but the likelihood low), e.g. manually making phone calls to verify the needed information, having backup paper copies of documents and so on.

When you wake up one morning and you're under a cyber attack and no longer have network access, how easy do you think it is to just start manually phoning in prescription information?

This may come as a shock to you, but the internet has greatly increased the efficiency of business over passing paper around and making phone calls. You can't just flick a switch and go back to the old system.

exactly, some transactions can be streamlined with digitization but most rely on humans giving a fuck.

Often local servers with daily batch uploading (at the time over phone lines) to larger corporate servers (often time shares)

Lost of labor hours are the real answer.

Basically what would happen was that someone would write it down on a paper form, mail that form off to the typing pool at the corporate headquarter where some clerk would then type it into the central system with a delay of 5-10 days from point of sale to recording into the inventory management system being totally normal, leading to a lot of overstocking and waste.

So to run offline would mean getting a hold of a lot of people that aren't there anymore in addition to reintroducing all of the risk(and fraud opportunities) that running without real time access to centralized data.

Considering that stores existed long before the Internet, perhaps all this is just a convenience that has become a liability.

> Yes, they need to record transactions (in some cases live for tax purposes)...

I'm pretty sure there was a time all these were handled without internet connection. it's just as society we decided that resilient fallback methods are undesirabled because of [insert of favourite regulatory rule]

Or that tax avoidance is harder if POS have to directly report information live to the tax authority, and reducing tax avoidance is a good thing.

"who will think of the taxes!"

> Some of those could be batched offline and verified when the connection is back up, but others can't.

One of the things that can be batched offline of course is card payments, which sort of negates the OP's point.

Credit cards can still use imprinter (from what I'm able to google but I haven't seen one in years), but debit transactions such as Interac need a connection.

Offline transactions are quite normal for many reasons

https://www.businessexpert.co.uk/payment-processing/offline-...

In some places like Turkey, shops traditionally keep a "debt book" where customers will accumulate debt for their purchases and pay once they have the money. With the prevalent use of credit cards the tradition is much less widespread today of course but it is still used by people who become unbanked for one reason or another(i.e. people who are persecuted, people who went bankrupt and want to keep their transactions out of books).

So, no, loss of connection or system break down won't necessarily mean that the trade stops. People have many ways of issuing IOUs and they can go creative.

Yes, but they don't need to be able to communicate with the entire internet. A few routing and firewall rules would go a long way for most stores.

>This is when cash comes in handy, but we're also transitioning into a cashless society so that option will slowly be gone.

Pharmacy IT infrastructure is a little more involved than the POS system at the checkout.

For pharmacies? Yeah - stock, ordering, prescription validation, (country dependent) drug seekers checks, vaccination records, ...

It's not just payments.

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