The Post Money Value

Where were you when the POS died

Yesterday, I was at the Apple store here in Toronto.  I had gone in to buy a few things (extra power cord, memory upgrade, Apple Air, etc).  I've always been impressed by the efficiency of that store.  Taking orders and payments on the floor, emailing receipts, signing up the Apple Care/Warranty stuff on the spot, etc.  It's a great shopping experience.

Except yesterday.

Yesterday, the point of sale systems went offline with the credit/debit card systems.  This was NOT Apple's fault rather TD Bank or Bell Canada or somebody in between but, for sure, not the Apple Store's fault.

Instantly, the Apple Store became Best Buy.  It was amazing, actually.  Surly staff, pissed off customers, no help, and long lines. Just like normal stores.  The transformation took all of ten minutes.

They could only take this weird stuff called cash or credit cards manually.  Yeah, manually.  Some of you kids may remember those gizmos where you run the credit card with a paper receipt thingy.  Then they had to call in the credit cards to get them authorized. This was for everything, even 15 dollar purchases.

The line for people waiting to checkout became long really fast. The youthful employees basically phreaked out over having to actually write out a form which took care of things like who was buying wait, serial numbers, etc.  The form they were using was the "downtime report" so it wasn't like somebody at HQ hadn't thought this would happen.

The customers. Well, there's a story.  People in line were taking shots at Apple.  Cracks about "bet they are using a damn Mac" were being flung around in anger not jest.  Really. I was expecting a flood of Windows back end shots, but the Apple faithful taking shots at their own kind?  This made the case, loud and clear, that grumpy customers are grumpy customers.  Even though every employee basically said TD bank is offline (which may or may not have been true), nobody cared. It was Apple's fault, Apple sucked, Mac's suck, life sucks, etc.

I hung out watching this for about 20 minutes after I got my stuff.  The nice lady who was processing my order happened to be, as she put it, from my era, so actually knew about those 'old days' when transactions actually involved a little bit a paperwork.  She said, quietly,that this had happened a couple of times before and in each case the employees go nuts before the customers.  She tended to roll her eyes over the whole thing as we both observed this carnival.

I headed home to play with the Air as a young Paris Hilton look alike demanded to know why she couldn't just leave her credit card there and come back tomorrow to pick up the card because she HAD TO HAVE the iPod for tonight, needed to get her nails done and shouldn't have to wait with all these people!!

[Note: POS stands for Point of Sale]

Important Reminder - Your One Liner

I'm digging through the 800+ emails, business plans, etc, as a result of the Blackberry Partners Fund announcement.  Lots of great stuff. To ensure we get fast responses out to folks, we, along with our partners at RBC Ventures have group meetings to zip through our outstanding lists of action items.

I've got a spreadsheet which I've been keeping track of things prior to them entering 'the system' (don't ask).  One of the columns is a one line description of the company to anchor the conversation. 

I get the one line description from your web site.  For each company, I type in the name.com and read the home page for the 'one liner' of what the company does just to remind me.

Make sure your home page can give me, your customers, and anybody else a speedy understanding of what it is you do.