What a ridiculous situation that the system is so fault intolerant that a single glitch can take out the tills over the whole country ! Surely even a primary school kid would design it to carry on locally if a national problem occurred. Who do they get to design things these days? Kindergarten?

"What a ridiculous situation that the system is so fault intolerant that a single glitch can take out the tills over the whole country ! Surely even a primary school kid would design it to carry on locally if a national problem occurred. Who do they get to design things these days? Kindergarten?""

Asuming your a troll here because the fact that it working for the self service tills means that its highly likely to be currently on a local only system and will get batch updated at the end of the day.

just that they don't use the scales for your shopping weight and someone else pushes it across the scanner.

I've noticed Tesco moving more and more over to self service, even on the manned tills. You have to scan your own club card and pull your receipt from the printer as well as stuffing your own card in the reader. Its like they are trying to reduce the interaction between till staff and customers, so we don't notice when they all get sacked.

frankly, that sounds ridiculous. Like, I suspect, the majority of people, I don't look at the price of the products I'm buying (other than to make sure they aren't ridiculously overpriced), let alone memorize it.

Actually, the other AC's got a point. Tesco's not exactly a small company. I know every little helps, but skimping on redundancy when it can lead to faults on this sort of scale is ridiculous. How hard can it be to store the prices locally? Worst case scenario then is they're charging in line with the store labels rather than at the adjusted price for the day. Or their sales data doesn't get back to head office until the afternoon.

So the fault is fixed by rebooting the tills. Surely managers should have tried turning the tills on and off again before closing....

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

>> So the fault is fixed by rebooting the tills. Surely managers should have tried turning the tills on and off again before closing...

Depends whether you mean rebooting the actual till hardware, or the virtual machine instance that runs in the back office. From what I recall of my stint at Tesco, the tills are thin clients (quite heavy old thin clients). So it may have been the VM instance that needed rebooting, or the VM server, or the thin client. I imagine the store managers probably only have access to reboot the VM instance - this is probably the only bit that runs Windows and is most likely to crash.

One thought: do the tills have to somehow establish a secure connection with a central server system when they start up?

Do the self-service tills wait longer before they time-out?

"common practice .. to roll out major software changes overnight on Sunday"

I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that they would risk losing less business if they rolled them out on a Saturday night. Not that I want them to lose less business...

Whaqui Jaqui was suggesting that Tesco, Boots, Asda, et al could maybe help out with the ID Card rollout?

Ha. If _only_ gov.it _was_ as generally reliable as supermarket till systems ...

I work with a former UNIX contractor for Tesco, they may use Windows for the actual checkout, but I'm pretty sure they use AIX for the local machines which serve them. It is unlikely a client problem if they all died, more likely a server side problem.

I have also been fairly reliably informed that Tesco sweat their assets heavily, it's not uncommon for them to use out of support hardware and software in their stores. (or it wasn't when afore mentioned UNIX guy worked there...)

AC because I don't want to get on Tesco's bad side...

heh, your name is Craig Cockburn

(sorry, someone had to say it - blame the parents)

When I went to one of the biggest Tesco's in the country this evening, so it looks like it might be something more complicated than flicking the power switch.

Isn't today the day they were planning a huge new relaunch of their Clubcard loyalty scheme? So that's worked out about as well as a Gordon Brown relaunch.

"suppose it hasn't occurred to them that they would risk losing less business if they rolled them out on a Saturday night. Not that I want them to lose less business..."

Possibly something to so with Sunday being a much much busier shopping day at Tesco's than Monday??

There's still Safeway's around? They disappeared around here.

Only so long Tesco can keep running Windows NT on their tills. There must come a point they upgrade to the 21st century and give their entire IT system the overhaul it needs. It's currently a mix of all sorts, Windows and Unix alike with nothing properly integrated.

I remember this happening more than once at ASDA when I worked there (10+ yrs ago).

If the tills went down, the policy was for all managers in the store to man a checkout, and "estimate" the value of the goods in each trolley, just to keep things moving. They considered it worse for business to close the store and waste all their customers time than to loose money by undervaluing the goods. Worked well, although it took longer than normal if at a busy time (due to there being less managers than checkout operators), it helped keep things moving, and kept the customers goodwill.