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Comment by craftkiller | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in a supermarket without this feature and when a customer would run away mid-order, my options were either stand there awkwardly while another potentially irate customer stares at me or call over a manager to get the override key to let me cancel the order (any voids/cancels over a certain dollar amount required a manager override key). Neither option was good. Both wasted time and created a bad experience for the customers. I occasionally see cashiers these days doing these `git stash` maneuvers and honestly I get jealous every time.

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The store I managed had a suspend/recall. Cart full of groceries only to realize you left your wallet (at home, in the car, whatever) suspend the transaction and print a slip with a barcode on it. Move the cart out of the way and take the next customer. The customer comes back and scans the slip at any register to recall the transaction, pay and collect their cart and leave without having to hold up lines/etc... Was a nice convenience many appreciated.

This very thing happened to me, and I was very pleasantly surprised with how this worked. It definitely took some of the embarrassment away from being a dolt

I worked at a store that had this feature except if you reloaded the transaction on a different register it still got attributed to the originating register and caused a headache at closing :(

Manual probably dictated that a policy of receipt transfer and (irrationally) presumed synchronous cash out times.

Management just didn't RTFM/FTFM.

When I was studying (late 00s) I worked at a large supermarket chain in the UK that had this. The system was surprisingly well designed.

It was based on Windows NT (somehow hardened, as I never saw a checkout show a BSOD or fail to boot) and was designed before a time when you had a continuous internet connection. There was a mini-server in the back office, and every night it would sync with HQ.

This meant all functionality, including taking credit card payments and loyalty, could be done offline. One time we had a electrical systems failure in the store, and everything - including chillers - went down. However each checkout had its own UPS and continued to operate without issue.

If, let's just say, every little (feature of the checkout software) helps — if you follow my drift — the architect of that system is a mate of mine. I've never worked with him (I know him through music stuff, not tech stuff), but he's a deeply thoughtful guy.

It was an option in the register when I was a cashier during the crash of '08 and I couldn't find a gig elsewhere.

But it was against policy to use the feature, since previous cashiers had worked out a way to scam the system somehow and pocket some of the cash being exchanged. I'm cloudy on the exact details after so long, but it was very, very annoying to have such a useful feature sitting there mocking me and a write up if I dared hit the button.

Instead of dealing with the offenders... punish everyone - workers and customers (with delayed/crappy checkout experiences). That's great management, sure. Situations like these - which I noticed as a kid - contributed to my early-onset cynicism.

If it's too hard to detect, management doesn't have much choice.

It would be smarter for that feature to require a manager's key, and then the manager could actively monitor the situation. But since the manager can't implement that feature, they have to work with what they have.

It read like they DID know how to spot it, and the reaction was... "never again for anyone under any circumstances".

Blanket bans like the one described are always wrong. ;)

If there's a problem, monitor it after every shift, or every day, or weekly. You know who worked what registers; monitor/scan/review, then take action against the offenders.

I worked food service with POS; we had to review things every drawer change, and discrepancies were noted. Repeated discrepancies (either money or between food usage and money) would be tied to someone (or multiple people) and action was taken. It's not always that hard, just a bit time consuming, but... it's part of the job (or was for me).

It's incredibly easy to detect.

Solving personnel problems with policy is unfortunately common at companies in the small-medium space. Very small companies tend to be more person oriented, and very large companies tend to have outgrown it (though they may still do it at the department level).

It is also one of the most annoying mistakes I see frequently repeated at startups and young businesses.

Solving problems with policy is common in all companies. It’s programming at the organisation level. Every policy is either a good candidate for automation or an indication of automation limitations.

Presumably suspend your partner in crimes transaction receipt is printed walk away. Partner slips you some money later.

Solution: don't hire scummy people, pay enough that you can afford decent folks, watch for a friend that always comes to a certain cashier especially while alone, watch for cashier being nervous when observed, watch for partner to break off transaction if observed, "forget card", or return goods shortly.

It's also obviously trivial to catch with the receipt but they will probably refuse to show it. A transaction log will also trivially show it if matched with register and time.

Anyone could potentially get away with this once but any dishonest person is going to want to do this repeatedly.

There is basically no excuse for not catching this as a manager and I see no reason to deny associates this useful feature.

The cashiers would 'fake' the completion and instead just suspend the transaction.

Management didn't bother checking for unusual rates of suspended transactions nor 'check off' on abandoned transactions.

It's almost always a management failure, as it's most likely they just didn't want to do the work instead of wasting time hitting on the inappropriately young employees...

Shouln't that be easy to spot if the items are never returned and inventory doesn't match up? You'd think any abandoned transactions would require signoff by someone else that the items were actually returned (or trashed if perished).

As I said, management is lazy and would rather engage in inappropriate conduct than try to actually do a good job.

In the store I worked in, which was a notable spot for people attempting credit card/gift card fraud and/or theft, the manager literally just gave me the override code because it happened so often I'd have him coming over like every 15 minutes to cancel something. We were also a super busy store at the same time as this so it would just leave a bunch of hyper-angry customers in line.

Do you know how the gift cards integrate with your POS system ? Do each provider have an API that was called to activate a card or was there something more centralized?

Not sure, this was like 10 years ago at this point and I didn't really pay attention to these details at that time.

Open loop cards just hit the usual network rails.

Closed loop cards are integrated between the POS backend and the program manager. Some large merchants manage their own card programs.

The psychology of this is funny. The right thing with such a POS is to have customer pay for everything so far, move their cart to the side, let them run and get their item, and then let them be front of line at that point to finish their full set of purchases.

99% of the stores I've ever seen don't have checkout aisles wide enough to allow this.

No, I meant, purchase, move cart beyond checkout area in front of cashier.

I guess there is fear their purchased goods might be stolen.

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