Minor Suck - in Finnish!

[Chromatix]

I happen to be an English-speaker who lives in Finland. So I don't necessarily understand everything that goes on around me. I can usually figure out when somebody's getting angry, though...

I happened to stop by one of the local corner-shops this afternoon, intending to pick up refreshments for a bike ride. There were a few people ahead of me, including some guy with a lottery ticket. So I stood there with my snacks and drinks and waited.

Lottery-Ticket Guy was in a rather heated discussion with the retailer, who in turn was on the phone in a slightly heated discussion with someone on the other end. I couldn't work out what was going on, but I did hear the word "tietokone" - meaning computer - a couple of times. Since he wasn't getting what he wanted, I had to assume that the lottery-ticket-issuing computer was offline. Which means that no lottery tickets can be issued. Which LTG seemed decidedly reluctant to accept. We've heard this story before...

So I continued to wait. But the retailer didn't serve me either, even though I was making a simple purchase. The retailer told me something in Finnish, still on her phone, which I completely failed to understand. So I suggested trying English...

...and it turned out that the whole register system was down. They couldn't, according to them, make *any* sales until it was sorted out, and suggested I try somewhere else.

No, not even if I paid cash.

So I put the snacks back on the shelf and the drinks back in the fridge, and left.

[LostMyMind]

Some people are completely depend on the computers and don't even know how to manually sum the total and calculate the tax.

[Javarod]

Some of the blame belongs on stores, i've worked in stores where they've made it clear that everything must be scanned. If you can't scan it, you can't sell it. No, you can't key it either. Imagine the computer goes down, guess what. Yep, store policy, can't sell you anything until it comes back up.

[Gurndigarn]

Some of the blame belongs on stores, i've worked in stores where they've made it clear that everything must be scanned.

To a certain extent, it's understandable.

The odds of the system going down: not often, under normal circumstances
Price of irritating a few customers during that time: not much
Potential losses due to theft if that system isn't followed: huge

[CaroPhoenix]

At The Gaming Store, we have to scan everything. However, if the computer goes down, we're still able to do handprinted tickets. We take down description of product (usually the name of the product), price, the product number, the subtotal, tax, total and whether they paid by cash, check or money. It's time consuming, but we're able to do it. But then again, the system doesn't go down too often & if it does, customers are very understanding.

[Dreamstalker]

The Game Store I worked at, we had to do transactions by hand quite a bit (half-assed wireless connection to the server died if you looked at the computer screen wrong) and had a calculator there for that purpose. The card terminal was generally unaffected, so sales could still be processed, it was just very slow.

The fun came when people either didn't write down specifics (credit used/issued, two methods of payment, discount, etc), got the price/title wrong or the whole thing was illegible. The owner's handwriting was the worst. Hi, you want me to enter these into the system, I need to be able to read it...

[blas]

I have to ask....have you ever met Ville Valo or been to a HIM concert? If so, I'm jealous.

[Muses_nightmare]

On the part of the cashier, I don't see it as being sucky at all. Some places you can't do sales with the computer down, even cash sales. THough I don't know the specifics of this place, I used to work at a place where if the system went down we couldn't process anything, because we couldn't open the till. Sounds stupid, but that's how it was.

[Cats]

Every month or so, in the middle of the night, our system goes through an update, and all the registers need to reboot. Since they all pull the loading information from the mainframe at the same time, the process is slow and can take 45 minutes (the controller sucks and can only dole out information so fast).

While we do have keys to manually open the registers, HQ has made it clear we are NOT to take any purcahses when we are down, even cash. They won't allow us to write down SKU's and add it up ourselves to ring in when the system is running again.

So we have to kick anyone out who's in there (usually 1 or 2 people, and we don't find out the registers are down until we try to ring one out since buisness is like 5 customers an hour at that part of the night) and lock the doors until we have a register fully loaded.

We are not told in advance of these updates to close before someone is expecting to get their goods or so we can shut off the registers we don't use at that time of night to let the rest of them boot faster. But as much as we'd like to be able to process cash sales, we are NOT allowed to do so, PERIOD. Everything MUST be scanned, and it must be scanned as the sale is being processed, no exceptions.

We go through the same thing with power outages, though we do have a register or two on a battery backup for about 5-10 minutes to process a few sales and get everyone out.

It sucks for the customers, yes, but as was already said, the potential theft from not following the system, even when one has a decent excuse to, can be huge and some places just don't want that wild card to come up at all and disallow it entirely as a precaution.