My POS system went down on a Saturday afternoon in June

I run a small coffee shop near Eastern Market, and about two months ago my credit card terminal just died at 2 PM on a Saturday. I had a line out the door for the afternoon rush and couldn't take a single card payment. I ended up grabbing a paper pad and writing down every order by hand, then running each card through a mobile app on my phone when I had a free second. It took me three hours to catch up on payments after the rush finally died down. Has anyone else had their payment system fail on a busy day and what did you do to keep things moving?

3 comments

3 Comments

grantp142d ago

Wrote down every order on napkins like it was 1985 and prayed nobody ordered a complicated latte with seven modifiers. Had one guy ask for a pour over and I just stared at him while my phone was dying trying to process a $4 charge through some janky card reader app. Ended up giving away about $60 worth of coffee for free because I lost the napkin orders in my pocket.

linda1141d ago

Actually those mobile card reader apps aren't really meant for running cards you already swiped, they only work for real-time transactions. So you probably couldn't have processed those payments later anyway unless you re-swiped every single card. I learned this the hard way when my terminal died and I tried to do the same thing with Square. Ended up having to refund half the transactions because they wouldn't go through after the fact. What worked better for me was just switching to cash only and writing IOU notes for regulars who promised to come back and pay. Lost a little money that day but not as much as I would have trying to fake-process cards through a phone app that wasn't designed for it.

the_simon1d ago

Man those napkin orders really take me back. I worked a summer at a busy food truck and we ran out of paper once so the owner started writing on the actual cardboard takeout boxes with a sharpie. By the end of the night we had a pile of half-orders and one guy got handed a box with someone else's name and a completely different dish. He just shrugged and ate it. Sometimes chaos is the only way to keep things moving when the tech fails.