There is no going back on the move to a cashless society, making forecourt operators vulnerable to IT outages as we saw last month. But, says industry pundit Jan Mikula, petrol garages can protect themselves by delaying software updates and waiting for possible wider fall-out.
Back in mid-June, while taking a short touring holiday in North and Mid Wales, it was rather surprising to see how many retail establishments had small signs at their tills saying ’Card Payment Only’’.
This spanned from hotels and restaurants, through to tourist attractions and small high street shops, right down to ice-cream parlours and even an occasional pub.
At the height of the covid crisis four years ago that was common, and understandable, but in rural Snowdonia in 2024 it just seemed rather odd.
Roll forward a month to what is now being called the CrowdStrike crisis: the ‘blue screen of death’ appearing on a great many retail, and beyond, IT system screens early on a Friday morning when their Windows-based devices suddenly refused to boot-up.
Airline booking systems, banking apps, hospital and GP information systems, and of course, some retail POS systems and card-processing apps all suddenly out of action. The result: chaos.
Retailers had goods to sell, but no means of actually recording a sale or taking an electronic payment for it. Consumers, used to waving a card at the cash desk didn’t have cash – and while apparently the fault only affected some computer networks, the resulting queues of people trying to use the ones that did work created more problems.
As far as we know, this particular crisis wasn’t due to a deliberate cyber attack. No, this was due to another recent trend in the IT industry of sending out system updates to all users simultaneously, without having tested them a hundred times offline to make sure that they’re safe.
According to friends who’ve spent a working lifetime at high levels within the IT industry, that’s old hat. Today many of the largest IT companies rely on AI to check their product and it goes live much more quickly, not to mention being a much cheaper method than the old ways.
Most retailers really don’t like cash, neither for that matter do the banks. It has so many drawbacks – it is dirty, smelly, needs counting and re-counting, requires physical security, and tempts criminals. All of this makes it expensive to process and dangerous to handle.
The trend to the cashless society is probably irreversible, although interestingly, some US states, such as New Jersey and Rhode Island, have put laws in place which prohibit retail businesses from refusing to accept cash. The same applies to cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco. The latter is, of course, where many of the Silicon Valley IT behemoths are based; perhaps that should tell us something?
If a cashless pub suffers from an IT outage there’s not much physically to stop it from actually selling a pint to a thirsty customer. Okay, the pub might have some difficulty giving change from a tenner, and it might upset its stock system, if it is that sophisticated, as many are not. But their pumps, whether hand-drawn or electric don’t usually require any IT system to actually allow pubs to dispense product to a customer – and put the cash into a temporary cash box. Sale completed.
Fuel retailers work in a rather more technologically advanced and integrated environment. Fuel pumps may depend on pump controllers possibly running on Windows-based software that are linked to POS and BOS and EFT systems, again, any or all of which could be Windows-based. If any of those systems crash, you may have plenty of stock and potential customers, but no means of transferring one to the other – even if the customers are thrusting wads of cash in front of you.
Unfortunately, there’s no realistic way of going back to being able to run everything manually; that’s especially true for the forecourt retailer as we move into the era of electric vehicle chargers – they’re all software-driven. The best advice comes from my friends in IT: Whenever you see a message on your screen, whether it’s a PC/laptop, pad or smartphone, telling you that new software updates are available, do what they all do: Wait! Don’t click the “Update Now” button. Leave it for 24 or 48 hours until everyone else has installed it – by then you’ll know whether it’s safe.
- Jan Mikula is writing on behalf of nationwide franchise accounting solutions EKW Group.
ekwgroup.co.uk
01942 816512
