[stricky]

In an emergency they will make it work I think. We lost power for a few days a couple of years ago and after about 24 hours the big stores were open with limited sales. They had cell phone based POS systems and refrigerated trucks.

A bigger problem would be cell phones. We had a storm a few weeks ago and our county lost cell phone coverage for about 5 hours. It was not even that bad of a storm. People were pissed. I can't imagine what would happen in a real disaster.

 

[jmohme]

We have all become far too reliant on the internet.
I do event photography and most of my sales are made on line, after the event is over so I really am at a disadvantage if service is interrupted, but I have had customers call me when they could not get online for one reason or another and have always been able to manually create an order for them.

Businesses that do online only sales are one thing, but any brick and mortar business that does not have some backup plan to allow them to carry on in the event of an outage, should really take a close look at their business plan.

 

[quake]

Why no cash sales? I understand they can't process credit/debit/EBT cards, place re-stocking orders, etc, with no internet access; but are their registers real-time linked to some central inventory database or something that would prevent scanning and ringing up an item?

 

[Carry16]

Last week a car ran into a telephone pole. The power was back pretty quick but it took about 4 hours to get the internet up. The problem is this happened in the business section of town. So Walmart, lowes, Costco were all basically closed. None of them could or would sell anything even for cash. It is not really that big of a deal but what if it was an emergency situation?

And once the raised numbers are gone from all the credit cards they WON'T be able to do a non-electronic transaction as best I can tell. This is progress. Wish there was a COSTCO by me.

 

[shotgunred]

Why no cash sales? I understand they can't process credit/debit/EBT cards, place re-stocking orders, etc, with no internet access; but are their registers real-time linked to some central inventory database or something that would prevent scanning and ringing up an item?

i believe it is because of their just in time computer system.

 

[bdcochran]

The same thing would happen, of course!

There is a very famous taco stand near my home. Like one day I counted 37 employees. A few years ago, the restaurant wisely put a secure generator in the parking lot with crash stanchions all around. Too many brown-outs and power outages in LA.

 

[quake]

i believe it is because of their just in time computer system.

That's the only thing I could come up with. Seems like it would be easy to add a simple software switch to 'limp mode', allowing local use without home-office connectivity.

Frankly seems moronic to not have such a software switch. :lv: