Stopped to grab a breakfast a McD’s one morning. Their system was down, but still selling stuff. I asked the counter girl about it, and she said she was doing it mostly from memory with the aid of a calculator.
I said to her, “You do know that the [meals] sales tax is %5?”
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“Multiply the total by 1.05.”
She looked up behind her to get a price, and worked the calculator. Guess she was so used to hitting item buttons, she didn’t know the prices, just the totals.
“Thanks” she said, recognizing the result.
Obviously, with thousands of “bar-coded” et al POS, it’s a bit different...
I’m actually shocked that they allowed things to be done ‘manually’. Every time in the last 20 years that I’ve been to a business with ‘the system down’, they have refused to make any sales until the system was back up. Even if it takes days.
The town I lived in until recently, about twenty years ago was surrounded by forest fires that blocked the highways that lead in or out of town, and burned down the electrical system and the telephone and cable (internet)system. The only businesses that would do business were the mom & pop places that did business the old way. Everyone else refused to sell anything, with food spoiling in the refrigerators and freezers; they would rather let it rot than take cash and screw up their computerized inventory. And forget about buying gasoline to try to escape on the ‘secret’ back roads that only a few people know about.
And emergency services were unprepared too; I actually loaned the emergency dispatcher for the Police Department and Fire Department a generator and a couple of ‘jerrycans’ of gas to run the base station radios. And a contractor business with gravity fed gasoline and diesel fuel tanks kept the cop cars and fire engines running so that they could get around and use their mobile radios.
It was then that I realized how fragile our modern computerized society was, even though I had been a sort of casual ‘prepper’for years.
It was a nervous six days before they got the fires under some control and restored electricity and wired communications. I couldn’t leave myself despite being capable of it, because I was taking care of two elderly and partially disabled parents who weren’t able to travel the back roads to get out of there.
Oh, and after three days, the town water system was dry. Once the gravity tanks on the hills ran dry, there was no way to refill them, without splicing in industrial grade three-phase 480V Generators... Of which none existed in town. I had to ration the 20 gallons of water I just happend to have had stored in the garage to wash hands and flush toilets once or twice a day.