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Comment by Jamie452 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I gather from this is to always try a dead card first just in case the store is in offline mode

They still capture the name on the card, so I would be careful about trying this, unless you can make use of a prepaid card.

IIRC, the grocery chain I worked for used to have an offline mode to move customers out the door.

Chick-fil-a has this.

One of the tech people there was on HN a few years ago describing their system. Credit card approval slows down the line, so the cards are automatically "approved" at the terminal, and the transaction is added to a queue.

The loss from fraudulent transactions turns out to be less than the loss from customers choosing another restaurant because of the speed of the lines.

The POS I work on also has this feature. Line busters take the order and payment but we have a toggle where you can immediately “approve” and queue it up. If the payment fails then the person handing you your food will see it on the order and ask you for alternative payment. It helps prevent loss and speeds up the line overall.

I was shopping at a mall with a visa vanilla card once. I got it as a gift and didn't know the limit. No matter what I bought the card kept going -- and I never got a balance of what was on the card. Eventually, later that day it stopped. I called customer support and asked how much was left on the balance. They told me they had no idea my balance - but everything I bought was mine.

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.

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?

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.

It's hit or miss. My (brand new) bank card and chase credit card are raised. But my other credit cards are flat.

> kachunk-kachunk credit card machines

How aptly descriptive.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

50% of sales? what do you think the gross margin is on average for each item sold?

2-3%, bit higher on perishables. Though i'd just ask lump sum payments in cash since it likely has to no go through corporate (as in, avoid the corporation).

It's Family Dollar, margin has to be almost nothing and sales per day is probably < $1k. That's why I said 50% of sales and not profit.

I go there daily because it's a nice 30min round trip walk and I wfh. I go up there to get a diet coke or something else just to get out of the house. It amazes me when i see a handwritten sign on the door "closed, system is down". I've gotten to know the cashiers so I asked and it's because the internet connection goes down all the time. That store has to one of the most poorly run things i've ever seen yet it stays in business somehow.

They're all run on a shoestring:

1: I doubt they're "with it" enough to put together a backup arrangement for internet.

2: Their internet problems are probably due to a cheapo router, loose wire, ect.

3: The employees probably like the break.

I think the point people are trying and failing to make is that asking for half of means sales is half of revenue not half of net and that you’re out of your goddamned mind if you think a store with razor thin margins would sell at a massive loss rather than just close due to connectivity problems.

Your responses imply that you think people are questioning whether you would lose money on the deal while we are instead saying you’ll get laughed out of the store, or possibly asked never to come back.

i'm not a businessman, just a computer nerd ( swe turned tech. consultant )

It seems like an easy problem to fix and a retail store being closed for a whole weekday because of inet access sounds crazy to me.

Unfortunately they are largely corporate, which is how they can sell items for such a cheap price. The store manager probably has zero say in nearly anything. Even if they wanted to "break the rules," I doubt they could make use of your connection as a backup, but I've also worked for smaller companies that were able to sell internet access to individual locations like Denny's and various large hotels in the US. Being able to somehow share sales would be the difficult part, since all sales are reported back to corporate.

Good luck if you make this work for you, it would be exciting to hear about if you're able to get them to work with you.

In that case the other 50%.

it's retail. the margin is 30-50% for sure.

EDIT: their last quarterly was 36%. they lost $3.7bn in 24Q4 -- the christmas quarter. sold to PE in Q1.

All my limited knowledge about retail is that losing money in Q4 means you’re dead. Are they fundamentally different than retail?

Pretty sure it'd be a lot better deal for them to have no sales than to pay out 50% of sales on stuff with single digit margins.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Anyone remember Bob's number?? Bob?! Oh the humanity! We're all gonna be canned!

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?

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.

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!

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

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