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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.

It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.

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I once went on a date where we hit a state-wide power outage. (Let's just say that the date did not go as planned.) We wound up eating at this restaurant, two towns over, that we saw a bunch of cars parked at. Turns out they had gas grills. They were working by flashlight and candlelight, they were cash only, they were adding up the bill on a hand calculator, they couldn't do shakes or french fries, they were pouring soda by hand out of bottles, but wow, were they ever doing business.

When something like that comes, you find a way or the business goes elsewhere. Taxes? Count the cash - that's what you sold during the power out. Multiply by the tax rate, and call it square.

Where I live, any taxes are built-in to the sticker retail price.

In a shorter term crisis, I can absolutely imagine smaller grocery stores near me using a cashbox for takings and recording purchases with a pen and paper. Any government would be highly supportive of this as it would be essential to prevent anarchy.

Any sane country has a sticker/menu price that is the price you pay when you settle up.

Sure, same here, but you cannot sell anything without recording it on the cash register anyway because of tax evasion.

> their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes

I say, if there's no electricity, nobody owes any taxes to this government.

>they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.

They don't have a piece of paper and a calculator as backup?

I think it stops at “after 2 hours the fire alert system stops working and anyway it’s too dark inside so any accident would not be covered by insurance hence we should wait it out”. Cash helps but it’s really overstated.

Two power outages where I live told me that.

Except total loss of electricity is not the only case of payment system being unavailable.

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