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.
‘LONE WOLF’: The suspect was difficult to locate, as he did not use a cellphone, did not contact family and often lived in abandoned sites or parks, police said Taipei police on Thursday morning arrested a man accused of numerous burglaries and at least 14 incidents of sexual assault spanning more than 20 years, in what might be the nation’s most notorious crime spree in recent years. Sixty-year-old Tu Ming-lang (涂明朗) — who was yesterday placed in judicial detention, after a judge determined he was a flight risk without a fixed address — faces multiple charges of sexual assault and burglary, police said. A task force comprised of various law enforcement agencies arrested Tu as part of an investigation into an April 28 burglary in Daan District (大安), in which a
Ninth graders were asked to define “trolling” on this year’s standardized exam, reflecting efforts to make the test better reflect real-life situations. Adjustments to this year’s Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students were revealed on Sunday, after the last cohort of students completed the test over the weekend. The Ministry of Education solicited feedback about the test from teachers, who approved of the new question in the English portion. Not only was question No. 20 “very much in line with real-life situations,” but it also used a new style in which students were asked to ascertain the correct dictionary definition based
Taiwan is on alert for monkeypox, a rare viral disease that has caused 87 infections in 11 countries over the past three weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Saturday. The WHO on Friday convened an emergency session to discuss a sudden outbreak of monkeypox in North America and Europe. Since the beginning of this month, 87 confirmed cases and 28 possible cases have been identified in 11 countries. The countries with the highest case counts are England with 29 cases, and Portugal and Spain with 23 each. Monkeypox is a viral zoonotic disease occurring primarily in the tropical rainforest areas
ADAPTING: The CECC said the policy change would happen this week at the earliest, while PCR testing stations would be used to diagnose people and prescribe drugs The general public would be able to use a positive rapid test result that has been confirmed by a doctor for COVID-19 diagnosis starting later this week at the soonest, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday, as it reported 79,441 new local infections and 53 deaths. The center on Saturday announced that it was expanding the rapid test diagnosis policy to people living in indigenous townships and outlying islands, starting today. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, yesterday said the policy might be further expanded to include “all people” this week, at the soonest. He
RSS