why in the blue blazes...
why in the blue blazes would a supermarket have its own date format?
One of my first employers stored future dates and and thus encountered the millennium bug very early.
They had been aware of the problem well before that, but because storage was still expensive, they put it off for a few years. Adding a digit or 2 to all dates was a big deal, requiring the whole database to be unpacked and repacked. It would have taken more than a weekend on the hardware of the time.
They worked around it for awhile by turning the last digit of the year into an alphanumeric (yes it was COBOL) so 2000 was 9A, 2001 was 9B etc.
They had come to a longer term fix by the time I left, just before they ran out of letters.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
