[masklinn]

> The no-shabbat-order-processing feels less like "we don't make the machines make money for us" than it feels like "Look, you can shop online, but we're not gonna load it and ship it until we get back from our families."

That interpretation doesn't make much sense to me. Unless there's a human actually validating each order individually right as you checkout, you could just have a note saying there won't be any shipping on saturday. Or even that orders only ship mon-fri. And nobody would find it surprising.

Other commenters' hypothesis (against doing business on shabbat) make a lot more sense, a checkout would in fact be "doing business" even if the business does that on its own it's still in your name and under your responsibility.

[AdamN]

As someone who works at a 24/7 retail company, I can say that if the orders stop flowing, somebody gets called to fix it (even if nobody's boxing it right then and there). B&H has it set up so that no outage will trigger a pager and I'm betting that if the site went down on Sabbath it would stay down.

[walrus01]

Wouldn't one solution to that be by hiring some shabbat goy sysadmins to operate the website infrastructure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbos_goy

[sulam]

There are orthodox interpretations that essentially mean you not only won't do work on Shabbat, you won't cause work to be done on your behalf.

The tradition of the Shabbat goy is interesting here, and suffice to say there are lots of gray area room for interpretation.

There's a reason so many Jews go into law. :)