#when technology fails

Direct Commerce Suite, you are a useless, antiquated point of sales system. You don’t make our lives as retailers any easier. You should be ashamed for developing this trash. Pretty much every five minutes while customers are waiting to have their purchases finalized, we’re standing there twiddling our thumbs while the order screen times out, we have to back out of the program, reboot the system, ring up the order again, watch it freeze again, try a different register, apologize to the customer for the umpteenth time and thank them for their patience, and then pray that the order screen doesn’t freeze again while trying to scan in the merchandise or bring up the payment screen.

My catch phrase has become, “No, computer! Why aren’t you letting me do the things I want to do?!” I’ve actually gotten to the point when I wonder if just smashing the computer will make it work better. It might, actually. We’ve had to write up manual receipts (so, using pen, paper, and manually calculating tax and discounts) for customers when the system fails us; at least this way we can send the customers on their merry way in a timely fashion and just deal with the system failures on our own time.