Some time ago, I was trying to buy a few hundred dollars worth of furniture, only to be informed that the cashier could not process my order because her computer was down. Everything I was buying had a price tag and I was paying cash, so I suggested that she find a pencil and some paper, and just write everything down, so she could enter it when the computer came back online. The concept apparently fried a circuit or two in her brain, because there was 6% sales tax on everything, and how was she supposed to know how much that would be? Plus, how was she supposed to know how much change to give me?
Nowadays, we don't have price tags on anything anymore. Prices are fetched from a database using the UPC as a key, so if the computer's down, the buyer is out of luck. At a previous employer, we sold specialty goods to contractors, so we had strong relationships with our customers. I drafted a plan to print up pads of paper sale forms that looked more or less like our (80x24 greenscreen) order screens, so if we lost connection to the mainframe, we could still move product from the warehouse to the customers; we'd just give them the product and bill 'em later. It was a risky move, but not really any riskier than sending our customers across the street to our competitors. To my knowledge, they've never had to use the manual system, thankfully.
We may not be "completely dependent on computers" just yet, but we seem to be getting there.
I know you're making a point, but it just sounds like you were dealing with particularly incompetent cashiers. I've been to a number of brick and mortar stores where they had a system exactly as you described. They simply copied my credit card onto carbon paper and wrote in the calculated total so that they could take care of the billing when the system came back online.
I don't dispute the claim that there are very competent cashiers all over the place. I just seem to be particularly lucky in finding their counterparts whose greatest usefulness is in flattening the curve.
Also, isn't it a little risky letting someone copy your credit card like that? Even if you trust the cashier not to steal the number, how do you know whether they're destroying the information after they're done with it?
Well, yes, that's the way they did it before computers, but no, the safeguards really weren't there. They used carbon paper to transfer the number from the card to the leaves of the receipt. So when the carbon gets discarded, it becomes trivial for someone downstream of the transaction to pull the carbon out of the trash and use the embedded number to do some internet or telephone-based shopping of his own.
It's funny--29 doesn't sound particularly young, but I'm really suppressing the urge to call you a whippersnapper.
Before widespread communications networks, credit card imprints were taken with machines that look like [1]. They are still sometimes used when networks are down or when there is no phone/Internet network (think temporary locations like fairs and carnivals). The security is that the credit card company will (hopefully) void invalid transactions...
Thats part of the service you get by paying for a credit card. You have the opportunity to review your expenses that month and contest any that you disagree with before you pay for it. On the other hand, if you made the purchase with a debit card, you would have a much harder time trying to reverse the transaction.
You don't have to wait for the register to go down to make a modern cashier have a mental segfault - just give them extra cash so you get less bills back.
For example on a $6.95 order hand over $12 and watch first for the bewilderment while keying in the amount and then the amazement when they give back the non-dollar bill change.
pedantic? yes. but as a fellow member of the "give-em-too-much-to-get-fewer-back" tribe, I feel that you might appreciate this particular bit of pedantry.
Only for a new cashier, really. It doesn't take long to understand what the customer is doing - once you've had a few "I can't make change for you because I'm out", it all makes sense and cashiers start to like the customers who minimise the change requirements.
I remember talking to someone who had clearly never worked in retail, complaining about their god-given right as a consumer to have change made for them trumping an open-air market vendor's right to have change for the rest of their sales for the day.
This always makes me sad and I'm shocked on the few occasions (rarer every day) when change is correctly counted back to me: "5 cents make 7 dollars, and 5 more dollars is 12. Have a good day."
I can't see how people accept that system of pricing. Put what I pay on the tag. Put whatever you expect me to pay, and do the same on your ads. I'm capable of understanding that prices may differ place to place due to tax differences. I hate bing asked for an amount different to the tag - there is no way of telling if you're being shafted. I'm not from the US.
The problem with the US is that the sales tax can be set by three different levels of government---the state, the county and the city---for instance, the state might have a sales tax of 5%, the county none and one particular city in that county 1%. What price do you advertise for the following?
1. A country side advertising campaign?
2. A state wide advertising campaign?
3. A local newspaper that serves the county?
As odd as it seems, that's the way it is here in the States (but I can sympathize, a friend from Sweden was horribly annoyed by the differences between sticker price and final price because of the tax rate).
I'd defend the practice, but there's a certain attractiveness to just showing me what my financial liability is. You start with sales tax, then you exempt certain classes of consumer goods from sales tax, then you impose an extra eighth of a percent on purchases made within this or that economic district (usually to help finance a stadium or megamall), and pretty soon, your consumers don't have any idea what their tax liability is going to be when they check out.
Over time, one does develop a vague sense of how much their purchases will be taxed, but I would definitely support a measure that required merchants to charge no more than what's on the tag.
Nowadays, we don't have price tags on anything anymore. Prices are fetched from a database using the UPC as a key, so if the computer's down, the buyer is out of luck. At a previous employer, we sold specialty goods to contractors, so we had strong relationships with our customers. I drafted a plan to print up pads of paper sale forms that looked more or less like our (80x24 greenscreen) order screens, so if we lost connection to the mainframe, we could still move product from the warehouse to the customers; we'd just give them the product and bill 'em later. It was a risky move, but not really any riskier than sending our customers across the street to our competitors. To my knowledge, they've never had to use the manual system, thankfully.
We may not be "completely dependent on computers" just yet, but we seem to be getting there.