> a bit fishy that McDonald's, Sainsbury's, Tesco & now Greggs have had serious payment/IT issues within one week."

Not really. It affected their meat based products, too.

That you call meat???

They failed to meat expectations...

Pity the sausage sellers, when times are hard its difficult to make both ends meat.

GNU Sir Pterry

" A princess is AWOL, the government refuses to admit defeat, and now pastry purveyor Greggs is unable to process card payments. How many more national crises can the Great British public weather before the streets burn? "

If the streets weren't soaked of rain water collected by all the potholes we'd be in an inferno by now.

"The difficulty in these situations is that many companies don't ever give a detailed technical breakdown of glitches."

But we do know one common factor: single point of failure. Bean-counters want cheap, little if any redundancy and then get taken by surprise when the beans stop arriving.

Do they have people to count the beans they put into the Bean and Cheese melts then? Best thing on the menu IMHO

They know how many beans make five.

Think of the children!!!

Gran has cash to treat the bairns - panic averted

In each case, they seem to be saying they installed an update and borked their systems. Now it could be an update of anything (maybe they changed to decaf in the IT room coffee machine), but is there any one program they all happen to be using for purchasing, that sent out an update to be installed this week, and they have all got around to installing it at different times...

Nahh... It was Putin... He wants riots on the street in the UK, and knows just how to accomplish it... If Wetherspoons goes down tomorrow, war will be declared by the end of the week...

This is down to North Korea acting on Chinas orders and using Russian hardware. Is it a coincidence that none of those countries have Greggs? I think not.

It's going to be some dependency somewhere that's changed or been whacked by something else changing.

> Nahh... It was Putin... He wants riots on the street in the UK, and knows just how to accomplish it...

Well, he got the Brexit he wanted; Britain is both poorer and divided....

Who Putin or the weatherspoons owner? they're both diabolical with complete disregard for human life.

It's grown faster than the EU average, faster than Germany and faster than France continually.

It's only "divided" because anti-democrats like you won't let it go.

Move on. You lost. You didn't get the catastrophe you wanted.

Come on then.

Out with the massive list of promised Brexit benefits that have been realised Grumpy of TB?

I definitely won't be holding my breath.

btw ... a democracy votes and changes it mind all the time ... its not a one off point in time. But you type never understood that.

And now ... I await your vast list of Promised Benefits Realised ....

(and with blaming anybody else if they haven't been ... With you lot, its "always somebody else fault" ..Immigrants/Woke/Tofu .... you have been in power for 8yrs since Brexit... Own the Sh1tSt0rm of Failure & incompetence you cuased!)

I'm not reading all that ranting but:

Somebody lied that Brexit had harmed economic growth, I pointed out that that is factually and demonstrably untrue.

> Somebody lied that Brexit had harmed economic growth, I pointed out that that is factually and demonstrably untrue.

That's not what [1] wrote yesterday... and the OBR claim it lowers GDP by four percent...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-19/brexit-s-lasting-economic-and-financial-damage-looks-inescapable

I can tell you it is truth that our growth in 2023 (0.5% GDP) is lower than the European average (0.7% GDP) - source: Statista.

Also, in Q4 of 2023, our GDP was 1% higher than it had been in Q4 of 2019, whereas the Eurozone GDP was 3% higher than it had been in Q4 of 2019 - source: UK Parliament Commons Library.

We may be outperforming Germany, but the majority of other EU countries are out-performing us. Given that we don't have a crystal ball to see how we would have performed if we hadn't left the EU, it's difficult to say if we would have performed even worse. However looking at the EU as a whole, we are being out-performed by them as far as growth is concerned.

We've been through this a million times. Yes the UK briefly had better growth than some EU members because our economy crashed further and there was the inevitable rebound. Known in the economics trade as the "dead cat bounce".

But growing from much worse to slightly worse is still pretty grotty and over the period from before Brexit to now the UK has fared far worse than most EU competitors and will continue to do so until we eventually and inevitably rejoin.

But prove me wrong, state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit. Just one indisputable benefit.

Ho hum, one hour in, 3 downvotes but not a single reply to my question: "state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit."

Come on, if you downvote please explain why we are better off in the sunny Brexit uplands.

Let's face reality, as far as anybody can tell there is no benefit and it's time the Brexit cheer leaders either come up with some genuine benefit or finally admit they were wrong.

> If Wetherspoons goes down tomorrow, war will be declared by the end of the week...

"You don't want to see me sober. You won't like me when I'm sober. "

A huge mis-steak bake!

And as usual, they try and pasty blame onto the IT department.....

They'll just sausage roll with it.

Am I missing out...? The last time I visited the UK and tried a Gregg's after all the invariable hype in the British Newspapers, I must say I was underwhelmed. Slop in some "pastry" and certainly nothing to get me wanting to run back to.

And I do like good sausage rolls and Cornish Pasties too. Even chip shop pies from the 1980s have fond memories when I lived in England.

But Gregg's...

Where you went wrong was assuming that Britons care about the actual quality or flavour of their food. As with so many things on this island, we accept - and celebrate - produce that would barely pass as acceptable for most nations. As a bakery, Greggs - and most high street independents - wouldn't be fit to fill the bins of their continental equivalent. And yet people here fetishise its wares.

German sausages are crap. Stop fetishising foreign things because they are foreign. It's bizarre.

Nobody is fetishising Greggs. It provides extremely cheap food with immediate delivery. It isn't the best, but that isn't always the only metric?

Their Cornish pasties are alright.

I was referring to bakeries - it's a few years since I was in Germany, but I'd assume sausages mostly come from butchers.

There is nothing short of self-described "artisanal" bakers in the city I live that can hold a candle to a typical European high street staple. Crappy Victoria sponges (slathered in cheap icing and layered with "creme"), low quality bread and the aforementioned beige pastires are celebrated almost as gourmet by people who - literally - don't seem to know better.

I've travelled extensively across the US and Europ and it's not me fetishising foreign - most US food is similar slop, majoring on quantity over quality. Our neigbours in southern Europe still have a bit of dignity about what they put in their mouths, though they seem to be following us down the greasy slope, albeit at slower rate.

Sounds about right.

Yep it's just about OK, with a low risk of food poisoning.

But in British eyes, that means it's world beating.

Didn't someone once say, "In God we trust, all others pay cash"

The tongue-in-cheek hysteria is a symptom of an inexplicable national fetishization of Greggs that has, to this writer's mind, appeared from nowhere. There is nothing particularly grabbing about the bakery's food

Before Private Equity near-killed it, the West Cornwall Pasty Co had much better pasties... They were even acceptable to this Cornishman's palate.

"the West Cornwall Pasty Co had much better pasties..."

They did, but they were much more expensive. Their breakfast butties weren't bad either!

As regards Greggs, the main selling points are the ubiquity of their shops and low prices. They wouldn't be my first choice of chain bakery shops, but their products are tolerable if nothing better is available, especially given the prices.

McDonalds on the other hand - not been in one of them for years!

>> the West Cornwall Pasty Co had much better pasties...

>>

> They did, but they were much more expensive.

They were always more than the proper bakers in Cornwall and their larges were what I'd consider a medium!

Greggs ain't cheap anymore. Nearly £2 a pasty. I can go to pound bakery and get two for £1. Tastes nice as well. Greggs shops look more like coffee shops these days.

Gregg's staff seem happy working there. I don't go in too often, because no need. But when I have the staff all seem surprisingly happy to be there.

One of my kids, who had real food preparation qualifications, ended up working at a Greggs as a sandwich maker after the restaurant he was working at shutdown because the owner wanted to retire.

He wasn't happy at Greggs. Exacting instructions about how the sandwiches should be made, and the work rate meant that he came home every day in a really bad mood (he could either do it right, or he could do it fast, achieving both was very demanding).

He gave the job up when he was offered an apprenticeship in railway engine maintenance, and he's now happy bashing, cutting and heating metal while fixing steam engines! What a switch of profession!

I'll see your "Not been in there for years", (McDonalds) and raise you "Never been there in my life", oh and never intend to.

> "Never been there in my life", oh and never intend to.

Their toilets are very clean. Plenty of people only go in for that reason. It's called a McShit.

If challenged and you claim that you are, in fact, going to order something, this is known as a McShit with lies.

-A.

What's the blandest thing on the menu?

Plain Porridge?

Eating a Sausage & Bacon baguette gives it just long enough to reach the correct gloopy consistency.

Goodness Gracious Me

(1) get rid of all that encryption kerfuffle used for payments

(2) replace with good old EBCDIC (mmmmmm....maybe UTF-8.....maybe ASCII) 80-column stuff

Less code, smaller network traffic, simpler hardware (you know 8086 and 16 bit assembler).........

No huge costs for "the cloud".......less money for Jeff Bezos.......

Simples!!!!

Oh....and the SW1 contingent behind the Online Safety Act 2024 would just LOVE THIS SUGGESTION TO DEATH!!!!!

Or we could all go back to cash like before covid. Absolutely no reliance on computer systems

If a POS system fails, the retailer may not be able to process transactions at all, regardless of the method of payment.

Once you've used up your in-hand cash reserves, how do you replenish them? If you withdraw cash from a cash machine or over the counter, there's YOUR direct reliance on computer systems. If you get paid cash in hand, redirect this question to the person paying you, and so on and so on until, somewhere in that daisychain of money exchanges that end up with a crisp new tenner in your pocket, you WILL find an indirect reliance on a computer system for your ability to obtain that cash.

So unless you're the Royal Mint and are printing your own money, don't think that using cash in preference to electronic forms of payment removes your reliance on computer systems entirely, it merely reduces your personal exposure to the risk of a failure somewhere.

i'd rather not be exposed to failures every time I need to eat. cash has been around for 1000s of years. computer systems not so long.

The general point is true but with cash the counter is no longer tightly bound to the computer so the system is tolerant of quite long outages unless..."If a POS system fails, the retailer may not be able to process transactions at all, regardless of the method of payment."

There you introduce a tight binding and if the PoS depends on a PoS at head office (or The Cloud) then when (not if) that goes out so does the entire business. If individual tills at the counter only need intermittent connection to head office, say to report the day's takings, then the rest of the business continues. In fact, if there's more than one till available even that branch's business continues. At the very worst tills depending on a single branch server only result in loss of the branch in the event of a server failure.

Tight integration may not be necessary for day-to-day business but it is for business-wide failure. Designing a system that way for a business with a national or international chain of branches is an abominable mistake.

Run out of cash? No problem, I work for a bank and have a key to the safe.

Greggs in Lanark did good tea the last time I was there.

I live in a small tourist seaside town in Somerset, UK. Some years back (quite a few, actually) there was a total shut down of data and voice services across the whole town on a Saturday afternoon in the summer, when the town was most busy.

Complete breakdown in retail. Shops and food outlets couldn't take cards, no cash machines were working, internet was dead, and not even the POS systems that used dial-up services were working!

Most shops continued to take cash, but if they didn't have a stand-alone till, they resorted to writing down the sales on paper. There was also a very rapid shortage of change.

Fortunately I had cash in my wallet (something I always try to do), and did not need to buy very much anyway, so wandered around town observing the mayhem. The strangest thing I saw was when some shops started digging out their old mechanical card swipe and sign machines. I did wonder at the time whether the banks were still able to process such transactions, but as I said, it was a while ago.

Although it shouldn't happen nowadays, as some outlets use mobile networks, and we're no longer totally reliant on one provider for other data services, if there was a more fundamental breakdown, it could happen again, and probably be even more disruptive.

We are blindly walking into a potential major disaster.

...Of the newest games to capture the attention of viewers is called Supermarket Simulator, and in it you check groceries and stock shelves. So yeah, maybe the masses deserve what they get.

To be fair, I remember a 1980s video game called Paperboy, simulating a step before supermarket assistant on many people's career path.

After a period as a delinquent brawler (Streets of Rage) I held the post of town planner (Sim City) before rising to the post of Emperor of the world (Civilization), which is about as high as I can rise without going full Molyneux.