[chasd00]

There's a Family Dollar by my house that is down at least 2 full days per month because of bad inet connectivity. I live close enough that with a small tower on my roof i can get line of sight to theirs. I've thought about offering them a backup link off my home inet if they give me 50% of sales whenever its in use. It would be a pretty good deal for them, better some sales when their inet is down vs none.

[jrodom]

50% of sales? what do you think the gross margin is on average for each item sold?

[chasd00]

It's Family Dollar, margin has to be almost nothing and sales per day is probably < $1k. That's why I said 50% of sales and not profit.

I go there daily because it's a nice 30min round trip walk and I wfh. I go up there to get a diet coke or something else just to get out of the house. It amazes me when i see a handwritten sign on the door "closed, system is down". I've gotten to know the cashiers so I asked and it's because the internet connection goes down all the time. That store has to one of the most poorly run things i've ever seen yet it stays in business somehow.

[hinkley]

I think the point people are trying and failing to make is that asking for half of means sales is half of revenue not half of net and that you’re out of your goddamned mind if you think a store with razor thin margins would sell at a massive loss rather than just close due to connectivity problems.

Your responses imply that you think people are questioning whether you would lose money on the deal while we are instead saying you’ll get laughed out of the store, or possibly asked never to come back.

[chasd00]

i'm not a businessman, just a computer nerd ( swe turned tech. consultant )

It seems like an easy problem to fix and a retail store being closed for a whole weekday because of inet access sounds crazy to me.

[gwbas1c]

They're all run on a shoestring:

1: I doubt they're "with it" enough to put together a backup arrangement for internet.

2: Their internet problems are probably due to a cheapo router, loose wire, ect.

3: The employees probably like the break.

[progmetaldev]

Unfortunately they are largely corporate, which is how they can sell items for such a cheap price. The store manager probably has zero say in nearly anything. Even if they wanted to "break the rules," I doubt they could make use of your connection as a backup, but I've also worked for smaller companies that were able to sell internet access to individual locations like Denny's and various large hotels in the US. Being able to somehow share sales would be the difficult part, since all sales are reported back to corporate.

Good luck if you make this work for you, it would be exciting to hear about if you're able to get them to work with you.

[consp]

2-3%, bit higher on perishables. Though i'd just ask lump sum payments in cash since it likely has to no go through corporate (as in, avoid the corporation).

[jiveturkey]

it's retail. the margin is 30-50% for sure.

EDIT: their last quarterly was 36%. they lost $3.7bn in 24Q4 -- the christmas quarter. sold to PE in Q1.

[hinkley]

All my limited knowledge about retail is that losing money in Q4 means you’re dead. Are they fundamentally different than retail?

[OptionOfT]

In that case the other 50%.

[ryandrake]

You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged.

Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card readers in the back that they can resuscitate for a few days until the technology is turned back on? Did they throw them all away?

[BenjiWiebe]

I think a lot of payment terminals have an option to record transactions offline and upload them later, but apparently it's not enabled by default - probably because it increases your risk that someone pays with a bad card.

[hinkley]

After having my credit card locked by stupid fraud prevention algorithms on my honeymoon, I had a long chat with them before going overseas a second time.

And that was the day Visa had a full on outage. We would walk into one shop, try to buy stuff, get declined, then go into the next and get accepted because they were running in offline mode.

Got a nice big bill from my cellphone carrier for making the call to visa to ask them wtf as well.

[ElevenLathe]

The kachunk-kachunk credit card machines need raised digits on the cards, and I don't think most banks have been issuing those for years at this point. Mine have been smooth for at least 10 years.

[progmetaldev]

My card tied to my main financial institution have the raised digits, but most cards you'd sign up for online now no longer have the raised digits (and often allow you to select art to appear on the card face).

[hinkley]

My credit union has been behind for a while. I think I had an embossed one until about nine years ago. Six at the latest. Still doesn’t have NFC in it.

[rkomorn]

> kachunk-kachunk credit card machines

How aptly descriptive.

[xboxnolifes]

It's hit or miss. My (brand new) bank card and chase credit card are raised. But my other credit cards are flat.

[voidmain0001]

If they used standalone merchant terminals, then those typically use the local LAN which can rollover to cellular or PoT in the event of a network outage. The store can process a card transaction with the merchant terminal and then reconcile with the end of day chit. This article from 2008 describes their PoS https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/store-operations/ca...

[Finnucane]

Then they would need to get the little booklets of invalid numbers to keep by the register to check (yes, I am old).

[Spooky23]

It’s family dollar. They don’t care about customer satisfaction and the cost of reliability is cost.

The stores are in the hood or middle of nowhere. The customers don’t have many options.

[progmetaldev]

These stores appear everywhere, even in areas with high income. You'd be surprised, but often people with those high incomes shop for certain products at very low rates, and that's how they keep their savings. A good example is garbage bags. Most people don't care too much about the quality of their garbage bags, unless they rip on the way to the bin.

[wat10000]

Many businesses don't lose revenue from short outages, it just gets shifted.

[BenjiWiebe]

Pretty sure it'd be a lot better deal for them to have no sales than to pay out 50% of sales on stuff with single digit margins.