I cashier at my store and I was on educational leave at the time this happened, so I don't know all the details. But one of my supervisors said while I was gone they did some sort of update or reset to the POS system and ever since then it's been really laggy sometimes. For instance I'll scan a bunch of stuff and it'll take like 3 or 4 seconds for it to catch up to what I've scanned and display all the items on the screen. Most of the registers have been randomly freezing on us too, like we'll have to restart the whole computer.
In addition to that, sometimes I'll hit the "EFT Payment" button and it starts to process the card, and all of a sudden I get a popup that says "CHECK PIN PAD". It's really irritating because I have to tell customers to slide their card again and it defeats the whole purpose of the convenience of being able to slide it whenever, and slows down the transaction because more often than not they have to go digging for it again.
All this stuff never used to happen, it was going on when I came back from school the week of Thanksgiving.
Has this been happening to anyone at any other stores?
We only get pin pad errors if the customer slides their card too quickly/slowly, or it tried to execute a function while the main POS is doing something else. Never had to restart the register though.
I do recall the only time having to restart a register is when a customer, after already swiping his card to pay, swiped it again assuming it didn't go through. He almost paid for the next customer's groceries (about $200 worth). Since it was a credit card is already asking for a signature, we had to pull the plug and restart the register to abort the transaction (there's no cancel option once the signature line shows up, pretty stupid, imo).
Yeah and that's what drives me crazy. I'm an IT major and I could probably write a better program. They're going through IBM and Toshiba for this crap and it's bull****.
That part about not being able to cancel once you get to the signature is really stupid. I really wish that was an option.
Do you have the old tan/grey registers or the newer touchscreens?
I've used the new touchscreens towards the end of my time with them, but they were nice! Sure, it took a while to get used to (which slows a lot of us down) but, very nice. No more having to decipher what error B864109 is and what to do with it.
We upgraded to that system a while ago and yeah it's pretty buggy. We have to deal with all the problems you said on a daily basis. You just deal with it and move on. When I get a pin pad error we have to suspend the order and go to another register. it fixes after the transaction, however.
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Yeah we have the touch screens. I'm surprised not every store has them by now, I would think it'd be a company wide thing like QueVision or something.
At the end of the day it's not a big deal, just a nuisance when it happens.
It's mainly because of red tape.
I'm sure most of the stores in our district received them. Ours was stored in receiving, waiting to be unpacked. The reason they were holding out was because ELMS scores went down in the two stores in the area that had the touchscreens. Same with QueVision. So they were waiting until more data was available. About the time I left they installed one at the very last register.
Was it just because people had to get used to the new systems, or other reasons? Any sort of big change like that is inevitably going to slow anyone down.
Was it just because people had to get used to the new systems, or other reasons? Any sort of big change like that is inevitably going to slow anyone down.
Like I said. Red tape.
It's not people getting used to the new systems. Most of us learn quickly.
It's management who dislike seeing even the slightest dip in whatever they're track that's supposed to stay up. Because they're chewed on by district managers. And district managers are chewed on by zone managers (or the other way around). Then the zone managers get chewed on by division managers. All because store 666 in Devil's Lair, CA switched to the new registers and had to get used to them.
