Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
I hear you, and in my second job 20+ years ago we were still trained (in a cursory fashion) to use physical charge slips in case of a POS system network outage, a full power outage would strain my imagination for ability to transact business at the majority of stores other than small mom and pop operations, and tbh even if such an outage had happened to me in 2005, I would not expect my department store to remain open and conduct sales.
Most retail workers are GenZ and struggle to understand what this would even look like because they’ve never conducted any transaction without POS computers (for looking up prices, for tallying them, for figuring tax and total, and computing change), so even if a dusty manual in the stockroom technically spells out a method of ringing sales using nothing but pen and paper and maybe a solar calculator, I would be surprised if any of the clerks working any given day would have the initiative to initiate an offline protocol. Most likely the store manager would usher customers out, lock up the store, keep the staff for 30 minutes to see if it came back on, and then go home.
Depending on the country it’s not that easy. Maybe something changed in the meantime but where I am those blocks are prefilled-numbered and stock needs to be controlled.
It’s not like you can (could?) keep a block „just in case” and thus many shopkeepers wouldn’t even bother in case of outages.
Depending where you live a good old trust can be a currency. Humans are great when it comes to adaptation, I bet I could just write on paper name, CC number and leave it on a paper for shopkeeper and everything would resolve just fine..
> How do you open the cash register for change when power is out?
I've only seen a few but I believe they have springs on the inside and roll on little wheels similar to how desk draws roll. Most can be opened with a key to trigger that event.
Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
Which countries exactly? I've traveled in UK and France and in both countries when the online cash register was down, they opened their physical ledger, made an entry and gave me a physical handwritten paper receipt written with pen and ink. They said they would make enter the same data online when the online cash register comes back up.
My understanding is that this (NF525) only applies to computerised cash registers (software must be certified NF525 compliant), which there is no obligation to use in the first place.
So it is perfectly legal to use pen and paper and a cash box.
In some countries whenever you print a receipt, a copy is also sent to the IRS equivalent of that country. Obviously there are events where that can't happen due to technical reasons outside of the store's control.
Which countries? And, again, I doubt that this is the full picture because there are many cases where people simply don't "print a receipt" perfectly legally...
Germany for example mandates printing a receipt. The receipt must be stored in a certified storage inside the cash register and is signed cryptographically, including the hash of the previous receipt such that there is a hash-chain of printed receipts. Therefore each printed receipt that the customer takes home (and maybe at some point hands in to the tax office for some reason) can be used to check the integrity of the cash register storage and all prior receipts in the chain.
Same in Portugal. Sync with the tax authority can be immediate or deferred (every x days). Obviously, you can still invoice manually using a receipt book, in case of failure or unavailability of software systems.
Thanks! European red tape madness strikes again... At least in France cash registers are not mandatory (for now...) so there is a way around this madness.
This is a bit more than just red tape madness, it's a strategy to make businesses more transparent.
This is about trying to reduce non-reported transactions and too many people dodging their reporting. Even if the rules for cash registries and reporting are detailed,
a) that's not really expensive for businesses - it's easy to automate and there are quite a number of competitors;
b) compared to accounting and tax rules, they are dead simple.
Receipts or invoices are the basis for a firm's whole economic activity, including the underpinning of their financial reporting, their tax burdens etc. And businesses failing to provide receipts erodes not only the tax base, but also any rights a consumer may have.
Its actually less red tape. Getting a second copy of a given invoice is trivial, processing of invoices for tax rebates is also mostly automatic (such as health and education expenses); tax invoicing uses well-defined formats, so its trivial to migrate between systems, and perform all kinds of analysis. Also, it increases transparency - you know that eg. the VAT you're paying is not ending in the vendor's pockets.
Most governments are not as stupid as the anti-government wingnuts would have you believe. They will not prosecute you for taking transactions non-electronically during a power outage.
No power is different than no internet, so that was different. We were a 24/7 store (7-Eleven) and sometimes we would close if it was a prolonged power outage. No one has 100% uptime, not even 24 hour gas stations.
Why would an employee tracking device be necessary to make transactions? It is just people without a cash position performing mental gymnastics in an attempt to justify it, by trying to bring it down to the level of electronic payment methods they convince themselves that, in a similar event, they would be no better off with cash, when in fact they almost certainly would. A merchant who refuses cash on account of a disabled cash register, under these circumstances, is not a serious one, since to do so would be to refuse all business. Those merchants who are so encumbered by scale and bureaucracy that they would be completely incapacitated should be circumvented.
> When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).
When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.