Possibilities to receive cashless payments while the company's network is down:
- printed, static QR code: customer scans it with their payment app and enters the amount
- have an NFC enabled phone that receives payments (most android devices can)
- use the “knuckle busters”: the old school way of imprinting the card number on paper
- NFC enabled device like the one on buses in some cities, synced only at the end of the day
- receive money via one of the marketplace apps: UberEat, Doordash, Grab
- customer browses and pays the company’s online shop in the store instead (this us what Decathlon did once it had a similar outage)
- what else?
I’m quite curious why McDonald’s apparently decided to have no fallback at all. They surely have thought about it. Is the efficiency loss too high? Fraud risk? Training costs?
I was thinking about this whenever I hear about airlines going down when their dinosaur-mainframe software breaks. How about each airport PRINTS an hourly update with ETAs for each inbound plane, where they intend it to depart, and the disposition for the crew of each plane. maybe even IDNs for all the baggage on each plane and each outbound passenger. Might take up 20-30 pages per hour at a non-hub airport. hubs could have their own "edge" device that can print on demand if the mainframe dies.
If the db goes down, make a bunch of copies of that paper, disseminate them, and keep running. worst case is planes don't run at 100% capacity. Just do the best you can to keep the next few legs going without the mothership telling you what to do. Shouldn't be that hard. I know one of the biggest constraints is that crew members run out of fly-able hours. So print that in the backup too: X pilot has Y hours left after HH::MM zulu time. Maybe lobby FAA to allow pilots to fly a few hr past their maximum a few times a year only if the scheduler goes down. I just dont accept that these billion-dollar networks should be this susceptible to disruption given the current state of tech.
Comments
Possibilities to receive cashless payments while the company's network is down:
- printed, static QR code: customer scans it with their payment app and enters the amount
- have an NFC enabled phone that receives payments (most android devices can)
- use the “knuckle busters”: the old school way of imprinting the card number on paper
- NFC enabled device like the one on buses in some cities, synced only at the end of the day
- receive money via one of the marketplace apps: UberEat, Doordash, Grab
- customer browses and pays the company’s online shop in the store instead (this us what Decathlon did once it had a similar outage)
- what else?
I’m quite curious why McDonald’s apparently decided to have no fallback at all. They surely have thought about it. Is the efficiency loss too high? Fraud risk? Training costs?
I was thinking about this whenever I hear about airlines going down when their dinosaur-mainframe software breaks. How about each airport PRINTS an hourly update with ETAs for each inbound plane, where they intend it to depart, and the disposition for the crew of each plane. maybe even IDNs for all the baggage on each plane and each outbound passenger. Might take up 20-30 pages per hour at a non-hub airport. hubs could have their own "edge" device that can print on demand if the mainframe dies.
If the db goes down, make a bunch of copies of that paper, disseminate them, and keep running. worst case is planes don't run at 100% capacity. Just do the best you can to keep the next few legs going without the mothership telling you what to do. Shouldn't be that hard. I know one of the biggest constraints is that crew members run out of fly-able hours. So print that in the backup too: X pilot has Y hours left after HH::MM zulu time. Maybe lobby FAA to allow pilots to fly a few hr past their maximum a few times a year only if the scheduler goes down. I just dont accept that these billion-dollar networks should be this susceptible to disruption given the current state of tech.
This is also how airlines used to work when it comes to collecting payments