Checkout systems at 7-Eleven convenience stores across Taiwan were restored yesterday morning after crashing late on Friday, President Chain Store Corp said.
The company runs the largest convenience store chain in the nation.
Operations of more than 6,000 7-Eleven stores have returned to normal after the company took measures to fix the technical problem, it said.
Photo courtesy of Chunghwa Post via CNA
The checkout systems went down at about 10:40pm on Friday, forcing staff to use calculators to manually calculate orders at the cash register.
Customers were only able to pay with cash, as barcodes on the goods could not be scanned into the sales systems.
Customers were also only given written receipts for their purchases, although they can return to the stores and exchange the manual receipt for a uniform invoice to be eligible for the Ministry of Finance’s cash prize draw.
A 7-Eleven clerk in Taichung on Friday told the Central News Agency that it felt like she had gone back to the era of “grandpa and grandma’s old grocery store.”
“As we all depend heavily on the checkout system and cannot remember the price tag of every item, we had to go to the shelves back and forth to check the prices before adding the prices of the purchases using a calculator,” she said.
Some customers did not have enough cash with them and had to leave stores empty-handed.
The convenience store chain also could not offer other services it normally provides, such as payment of electricity and water bills, as well as deliveries from online shopping.
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