The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
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.
If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.
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.
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 cards and payment networks have always explicitly supported "Offline" processing like that.
The kind of fraud that system enables isn't really common.
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.
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.)
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.
That's not the case. There are individual laws in each country that govern this.
https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
Either way, there should be no reason grocery stores don't accept cash imo.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index...
Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
But in this case, an emergency, I would assume someone would still know how to take a manual payment receipt!