Businesses were hit hard during the Optus outage, with EFTPOS machines left out of action. As Australia moves further towards being completely cashless, experts say the outage isn't enough to see cash return as king.
Otherwise as a business owner you can go back to having to maintain a float, ducking down to the bank at lunch to pick up more dollar coins, “sorry I’ve only got fives, so here’s 7 fives and 45 cents change”, being wary of employees tickling the till, trying to reconcile said till with the receipts at the end of the day, carrying the day’s takings to night safes, and so on and so forth.
And as a consumer you can go wait at banks, or use that perfectly functional paywave card at an ATM for a bundle of cash that comes in $50 or $20 denominations, so no deal for you if you’ve got $8 in there and you want a can of baked beans and a half loaf for dinner. Or you can realise you don’t have $40 in cash for a taxi home tonight because you bought one $11 drink too many. Or miss out on the delights of carrying a kilo of shrapnel around in your wallet, and saying “wait! I can do this!” and counting out $4.35 in five , ten, twenty, and fifty cent pieces, while everyone waits for you.
What is needed is network redundancy and an offline mode for electronic payments. Bring back the rollers and the carbon transfer if you really have to. But if I can use my card and buy a $13 sandwich on a flight with no connectivity, I don’t see why EFTPOS terminals on the ground can’t store and forward Chip and PIN transactions.
You are absolutely correct, but that does not make it impossible to go back let alone using both at the same time.
It also works the other way around too:
Oh I dropped my phone, now I can’t buy anything and don’t get anywhere unless I walk.
Or the battery just ran out.
Or the network broke.
Any such minor inconvenience can take everything down with it.
I could also say in the case against cash that I dropped my wallet , or my house caught fire and all that money under the mattress was lost, etc.
Anyway, I’m happy with both being available, pretty much like how it is now. Are electronic transactions more convenient 99 percent of the time? In my opinion, absolutely.
And in this incident it wasn’t “everything is broken Australia-wide”, it was whoever chose Optus (ahem, Australia-wide, I grant you) without having a suitable backup plan in place. That’s some 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses, so it’s no small amount, but still.
For most of those (notably “consumers”), that backup plan is simply “I’ll have do it tomorrow”. For businesses, their livelihood depends on it.
If you asked those businesses to choose between :
a service will work for 99.9 percent of the time when you need it (8.5 hours downtime a year) for $100 a month, or
a service that will work for 99.99 percent of the time when you need it (1 hour a year) for $250 a month.
The vast majority will choose the cheaper version and rationalise away the chance of losses… until they experience those losses.
I hope that those businesses who have lost out big time have looked at their planning and have noticed their single point of failure, and are busily working on ways to fix it. That can be cash, or EFTPOS on alternative networks, or IOUs or whatever.
There is no going back of you don’t want to go back. Otherwise…
Otherwise as a business owner you can go back to having to maintain a float, ducking down to the bank at lunch to pick up more dollar coins, “sorry I’ve only got fives, so here’s 7 fives and 45 cents change”, being wary of employees tickling the till, trying to reconcile said till with the receipts at the end of the day, carrying the day’s takings to night safes, and so on and so forth.
And as a consumer you can go wait at banks, or use that perfectly functional paywave card at an ATM for a bundle of cash that comes in $50 or $20 denominations, so no deal for you if you’ve got $8 in there and you want a can of baked beans and a half loaf for dinner. Or you can realise you don’t have $40 in cash for a taxi home tonight because you bought one $11 drink too many. Or miss out on the delights of carrying a kilo of shrapnel around in your wallet, and saying “wait! I can do this!” and counting out $4.35 in five , ten, twenty, and fifty cent pieces, while everyone waits for you.
What is needed is network redundancy and an offline mode for electronic payments. Bring back the rollers and the carbon transfer if you really have to. But if I can use my card and buy a $13 sandwich on a flight with no connectivity, I don’t see why EFTPOS terminals on the ground can’t store and forward Chip and PIN transactions.
You are absolutely correct, but that does not make it impossible to go back let alone using both at the same time. It also works the other way around too: Oh I dropped my phone, now I can’t buy anything and don’t get anywhere unless I walk. Or the battery just ran out. Or the network broke. Any such minor inconvenience can take everything down with it.
I could also say in the case against cash that I dropped my wallet , or my house caught fire and all that money under the mattress was lost, etc.
Anyway, I’m happy with both being available, pretty much like how it is now. Are electronic transactions more convenient 99 percent of the time? In my opinion, absolutely.
And in this incident it wasn’t “everything is broken Australia-wide”, it was whoever chose Optus (ahem, Australia-wide, I grant you) without having a suitable backup plan in place. That’s some 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses, so it’s no small amount, but still.
For most of those (notably “consumers”), that backup plan is simply “I’ll have do it tomorrow”. For businesses, their livelihood depends on it.
If you asked those businesses to choose between :
The vast majority will choose the cheaper version and rationalise away the chance of losses… until they experience those losses.
I hope that those businesses who have lost out big time have looked at their planning and have noticed their single point of failure, and are busily working on ways to fix it. That can be cash, or EFTPOS on alternative networks, or IOUs or whatever.
Would be cool if they simply had a fall back network. But 5$ more? Nah.