> Do stores really need to be connected to the internet all the time?
Some of them do.
A few weeks ago, I was at a Roam Burger outlet in San Francisco whose Toast point of sale system was down due to some server-side problem. They couldn't sell me a burger. Not even for cash. I had a nice chat with the store manager, who didn't have anything else to do. Then I left and ate elsewhere.
Toast docs: "If the restaurant cannot communicate with the Toast cloud, the devices cannot communicate with each other."[1] They have a lot of outages, according to third party monitoring.[2] Their own status page doesn't show those outages.[3] But their outage history does.[4]
They're "transitioning" to a system where one of the local devices can be a host for the others when not connected to the "cloud".
Back in the day when this happened employees would simply record the transactions in a physical ledger (my fancy way of saying pen and paper) and enter them later. Why is this not possible anymore? Do you need internet access to unlock your burger ingredients and turn on the grill? I would not be surprised if the answer is unironically yes.
I feel the underlying issue with a lot of these things is that no one seems to trust anyone, so nothing can be done "outside the system". As you say, the solution for these kind of outages are easy: just write some stuff down on paper and enter it later. But good heavens, we can't let people just enter data! Every possible avenue of abuse or mistakes must be covered.
Second problem is ill-designed systems which don't take exceptions in to account. Sometimes because of the preceding reason, sometimes just "oops, we didn't think of that".
Let's say you're running a 10000 store burger shop. There is an outage and all of them are offline now.
There's the sheer hassle of recording everything and everything needs to be recorded correctly for compliance. Not only does it need to be recorded, but now it needs to be manually inputted back in correctly as well.
Let's say you could do that. More & more stores are getting rid of their fronting staff for the Kiosk systems. The store won't even have the capacity to keep up.
Now you've got boatloads of cash sitting in these stores that far exceed what normally would be there. Target for robbery.
If you pencil all the orders how will the fulfillment systems know when to ship you replacements and of what? Now reconciliation needs to happen across all of them to make sure they're properly stocked.
> Let's say you're running a 10000 store burger shop. There is an outage and all of them are offline now.
That happened to McDonalds on March 23, 2024.[1] Outlets in UK, Australia, Japan, Thailand were down for hours. Burger sales stopped at most locations.
No backup plan. Unlike Waffle House.[2]
This is a serious issue for disaster preparedness. The Waffle House CEO tries to get other key businesses to prep more. He says that if you can keep the Waffle House, the Walgreens, and the WalMart open after a disaster, the community comes back fast.
Do they even have enough pen and paper at shops? And somebody that can use them in the right way to keep track of the transactions and make sense of them again later on.
Some of them do.
A few weeks ago, I was at a Roam Burger outlet in San Francisco whose Toast point of sale system was down due to some server-side problem. They couldn't sell me a burger. Not even for cash. I had a nice chat with the store manager, who didn't have anything else to do. Then I left and ate elsewhere.
Toast docs: "If the restaurant cannot communicate with the Toast cloud, the devices cannot communicate with each other."[1] They have a lot of outages, according to third party monitoring.[2] Their own status page doesn't show those outages.[3] But their outage history does.[4] They're "transitioning" to a system where one of the local devices can be a host for the others when not connected to the "cloud".
[1] https://doc.toasttab.com/doc/platformguide/platformOfflineMo...
[2] https://isdown.app/integrations/toast
[3] https://status-dev.toasttab.com/
[4] https://status.toasttab.com/history