I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.
Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out.
The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque.
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.
Sure, but if we are talking about backup in outages you can also get credit card payments when power is down using something like a Stripe Terminal.
This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
In my experience, for the 4G/5G network to be down something really serious must be happening. I had long power outages (more than a few hours, in some cases even days) that affected multiple regions in places that I lived before that still had working cell network. I assume cell networks have backup power and preferential usage of the power grid, but I am not a specialist.
And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages.
Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
Used to work for a telco. Cell sites have battery backup. Some have generators. Any fibre repeaters also will, as do any radio based backhaul sites. The HLR/core network etc will run indefinitely due to generators & strict fuel supply contracts for said generators.
If a city has an extended power outage such that the battery backed cell network goes down, then everything else will be failing too and payments are the least of your problems.
Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail.
Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density.
It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?"
Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
Credit card processing existed before widespread telecommunications infrastructure. Maybe we should require payment cards to have raised numbers like they used to so the old carbon copy machines continue to work.
Credit cards and payment networks have always explicitly supported "Offline" processing like that.
The kind of fraud that system enables isn't really common.
In Lisbon's airport they are temporarily back to just stamping the passports without the biometric stuff. There are already reports that the checks are being lax.
I was in a Tesco when there was a power outage - the self checkouts all died (and rebooted into a custon Debian based OS with a Chromium front end by the looks of it), but the staffed tills still worked and could accept Chip+PIN but not contactless.
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent.
PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers.
That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..
> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
They have to accept cash in the US as well. The post you're replying to is just saying that they can't ring anything up or accept any payment without power.
