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Comment by LintBaron | Hacker News Reader

Not true for the EU. Every invoice needs to be digitally signed.

If the computer is down, no sale can happen.

That’s hilarious. I’m pretty sure every grocery store and most restaurants keep the old carbon copy credit card machine thingys to take payments when the power/computer/internet is down. Years ago I had to use one to take a payment during an internet outage.

http://www.cashandcredit.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=31...

I can't imagine those working too well these days. None of my cards have raised numbers, they'd make a completely blank impression. They have probably been completely phased out in the UK.

You write the number down with a pen on the carbon paper. The swipe isn’t required.

They may have them, but that's no guarantee the staff will be willing and able to use them.

Some years ago, I went out for coffee with a friend. The coffee shop's card terminal was down for whatever reason. I could see an imprinter and a stack of the slips on a shelf behind the counter. I even offered to show the barista how to use them, but she...ah...declined.

When I worked in restaurants they would force us to use them. It was rare but it happened a handful of times.

Hah. I had an amusing situation when an employee of Domino's couldn't make a swipe with my card. It didn't had a chip and it was back in 2016.

I can bet $50 the total of 'carbon copy machine' in the whole country is the double digit number, only because some biz older than 20 y/o are still in the biz and they have it somewhere in some closet.

Edit: ah, yes, imprinter

I'm in the US. Since 2000, I've only had my card used in an imprinter once. (And I'm not sure if it ever happened in the 1990's either.) I remember who did it, it was the Days Inn on the north side of Disneyland.

Not invoices, just cash transactions need receipts.

The receipts are issued by machines that can sync with the government services frequently, but it's not synchronous. All transactions are written in a special "flash" memory and synced via the included data sim card each 5-10 minutes.

Buffering up to 24 hours is possible.

You can do a receipt by hand, or ignore altogether, frankly. This never stopped anyone in the real world.

The EU has been going down the rabbit hole of administrative madness for years now but that should not stop anyone from facing emergencies.

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