Unlike digital forms of payment, cash does not crash.
“Cash payments only.”
These are not words you’d normally expect to see adorning the tills of the UK’s second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, which has spent the past decade or so encouraging its customers to use (often card-only) self-service tills and has even experimented with “SmartShop Pick & Go” checkout-free stores. But on Saturday (March 16), Sainsbury’s stores were blazoned with improvised signs informing customers that cash was (in some cases, together with chip-and-pin card payments) the only payment option available.
The reason?
A massive outage disabling contactless and mobile payments across all of the chain’s stores, as well as at its subsidiary Argos. Sainsbury’s blamed the outage on a software glitch that impacted its online ordering system and contactless in-store payments:
Bad Timing
As one IT security specialist told the Daily Mail, there’s a basic rule in technology, especially in the retail space — never deploy on a Friday:
The technology involved in these systems has only grown more fragile and complex over the years, and there is rarely an incentive to reduce the complexity or rebuild them properly from the ground up.
‘At this scale and complexity thorough testing is essential, as even the slightest mistake can have unpredictable consequences – as we’ve seen.
‘This is a fundamental risk of centralised control of systems by large companies — when these systems are not centralised any failures are local and so impacts are limited.
To compound matters, hours after Sainsbury’s system went down, Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain, with some 4,000 stores, announced that it, too, was having to cancel online orders due to a “technical issue.” In a country where the overwhelming majority of people have abandoned cash in favour of the speed and convenience of contactless payments and where banks have been closing branches and ATMs at breakneck speed, making it harder for their customers to access cash, the result was chaos. From The Telegraph:
[Sainsbury’s] cancelled all home deliveries that were scheduled for Saturday and told customers to rebook for Sunday or later on next week.
In stores, customers reported being unable to pay using contactless cards and a number said tills were only able to take cash payments.
“Due to an error with an overnight software update, we are experiencing issues with contactless payments,” a Sainsbury’s spokesperson said.
The issues at Sainsbury’s come a day after McDonalds customers were left unable to place orders because of IT outages caused by a “third-party configuration change”.
In what is being reported as an unrelated incident, McDonald’s stores around the globe, including Australia, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Canada, China and the UK, on Friday suffered a technical glitch, “caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change,” that made it impossible for customers to pay for their orders, forcing the fast-food chain to shutter some of its outlets.
While all of Sainsbury’s stores remained open during the outage, many of them are so heavily geared toward self-service that when disaster hit the staff were unable to take up the slack. As the Daily Mail reported, “shoppers at a large branch on Cromwell Road, west London, [said] the store, which offers around 20 self-checkout tills, only had three operating counters, causing a ‘meltdown’ around the payment area and snaking queues.” Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s in-store ATMs quickly ran out of cash, leaving many customers unable to make any purchases at all.
System Fragility
This short-lived chaos at the UK’s two largest supermarkets serves, or at least should serve, as a reminder of one of the main dangers of going completely cashless: system fragility. Unlike all digital forms of payment, cash does not crash…
Continue reading on Naked Capitalism
Nick Corbishley 