[glenjamin]

I chatted to a staff member on the checkout of my local coop supermarket

She said that every shelf item is ordered on a JIT basis as the store stock levels require them - there are no standing orders to a store

Based on that, I presume they didn’t really know what any store would need

Even when they were struggling my local store still had a decent stock of lots of stuff - just some shelves were empty

[bobthepanda]

You could (and people did) run this in the pre-internet days with basically just phone calls and a desk to receive them. The problem is that by now this represents an incredible increase in manpower required overnight.

[grues-dinner]

And you need a process to follow. You can't just have nearly 4000 supermarkets ringing up HQ at random and reading out lists of 1000 items each. Then what? Back when a supermarket chain did operate like that, the processes like "fill in form ABC in triplicate, forward two to department DEF for batching and then the forward one to department GHI for supplier orders and they produce forms XYZ to send to department JKL for turning into orders for dispatch from warehouses". And so on and so on. You can't just magic up that entire infrastructure and knowledge even if you could get the warm bodies to implement it. Everyone who remembers how to operate a system like that is retired or has forgotten the details, all the forms were destroyed years ago and even the buildings with the phones and vacuum tubes and mail rooms don't exist.

Of course you could stand up a whole new system like that eventually, but you could also use the time to fix the computers and get back to business probably sooner.

But I imagine during those 3 weeks, there were a lot of phone calls, ad-hoc processes being invented and general chaos to get some minimal level of service limping along.

[7952]

I agree, although it seems like a failure of imagination that this is so difficult. The staff will have a good understanding of what usually happens and what needs to happen. What they are lacking is some really basic things that are the natural monopoly of "the system".

Perhaps we need fallback systems that can rebuild some of that utility from scratch...

* A communication channel of last resort that can be bootstrapped. Like an emergency RCS messaging number that everyone is given or even a print/mailing service.

* A way to authenticate people getting in touch using photo ID, archived employee data or some kind of web of trust.

* A way to send messages to everyone using a he RCS system.

* A way to commission printing, delivery and collection of printed forms.

* A bot that can guide people to enter data into a particular schema.

* An append only data store that records messages. A filtering and export layer on top of that.

* A way to give people access to an office suite outside of the normal MS/Google subscription.

* A reliable third party wifi/cell service that is detached from your infrastructure.

* A pool of admin people who can run OCR, do data entry.

Basically you onboard people onto an emergency system. And have some basic resources that let people communicate and start spreadsheets.

[bobthepanda]

part of the problem with emergency systems is that whatever emergency system is going to take you from zero to over capacity on whatever system it is, particularly if you are requiring communication from suddenly over-burdened human staff working frantically, and these processes may break down because of that.

[chatmasta]

> Everyone who remembers how to operate a system like that is retired or has forgotten the details

Anyone who’s experienced the sudden emergence of middle management might feel otherwise :) please don’t teach those people the meaning of “triplicate,” they might try to apply it to next quarter’s Jira workflows…

[grues-dinner]

One day you'll find a sheet of carbon paper in the office laserjet and you'll know it's starting.

I wonder if we could negotiate a return to typewriters and paper if it means individual offices and a tea trolley?

[chatmasta]

I remember when I was a teenager working the register at a local store. The power went out one day, and we processed credit cards with a device that imprinted the embossed card number onto a paper for later reconciliation.

That wouldn’t work today for a number of reasons but it was cool to see that kind of backup plan in place.

[phinnaeus]

I’ve seen cc impression machines within the past 5 years in small town america

[fredoralive]

In the UK the credit / debit cards I've had issued in the last few years have been flat, with details just printed, so that level of manual processing is presumably defunct here.

[OJFord]

Don't forget chip & PIN is state of the art novel tech in the US. (From memory I think it was required here in the UK from Valentine's day^ in something like 2005.)

(^I remember the day better than the year because the ad campaign was something like 'I <3 PIN'.)

[bobthepanda]

that is mostly because major US retailers sued Visa/Mastercard to make it not enforceable via lower interchange fees, since then they would have to change tens of thousands of point-of-sale systems at each one

[chatmasta]

In my case all the perishable shelves were empty - no fruit, no vegetables, no meat, no dairy. I checked every few days for multiple weeks and it wasn’t until three weeks after the incident I was able to buy chicken again.

It’s possible they were ordering some default level of stock and I just didn’t go at the right time to see it, but it sure looked like they were missing the inventory… when I first asked the lady “is the food missing because of the bank holiday?” and she said “no because of the cyber attack” I thought she was joking! It reminded me of the March 2020 shelves.