Panic buying

The failure of one payment provider’s systems over the weekend highlights what that awful IT jargon term ‘mission-critical’ really means.

According to the press reports out so far, Sainsbury’s was one of the retailers most affected by the failure of some of Barclaycard’s systems for about an hour on Saturday afternoon. What was described as ‘chaos’ was seen in some stores, as shoppers got to the tills and couldn’t pay.

Of course, technically store staff could have fallen back on the old manual method of accepting card transactions, by taking a carbon copy of each customer’s payment card. But how many retailers keep carbon slips and the old style credit-card machines at their tills; and even if you have some knocking around in store then do any of you staff even know how to use them? I’m not even going to mention PCIDSS in relation to this practise, I have no idea if taking copies of card details this way would invalidate your compliance.

Back in the day I worked in retail while at university, and remember well a power cut in store forcing us to fall back on the old-fashioned method for accepting card payments one afternoon. This was in the late 1990s, and even then most of the staff my age had no clue how to take payment this way, and in any case customers were rightly wary of letting us take copies of their card details.

In 2010, payment systems just have to work. There really is no fall back. And if banks want retailers to invest in contactless payment terminals (there will be more on this topic in Friday’s issue) so more of their sales are taken electronically, then such failures can’t occur.