Obviously this is about the power outage in Spain.
While normally, if a card declines, people would probably have to leave their IDs with the restaurant while they went to get a withdrawl from their bank; this is a power outage, withdrawls wouldn’t work. It would be silly to arrest people because of a power outage. So I’m assuming people just have to give the restaurant owner/management their identity info with a promise to pay?
And power outages shouldn’t affect buses, since they run on gasoline/diesel, but the payment system processing transit passes might not work. Do buses still get run during a power outage and they just let people on for free, or do they just shut down the bus lines?
When I worked in a restaurant we still had paper bills in the office we could write up if our system was down. If you wanted to pay with card, we would offer to write down your card info and charge it later, or accept cash only. We’d always inform new customers of this before taking their order.
If someone already ordered and was unable to pay we’d just take the loss on good faith that they’d return to pay, no holding ID or anything like that. It’s a relatively small loss for the restaurant to maintain a good reputation. Orders get comped all the time for more trivial reasons, and food cost is already a major part of a restaurant’s overhead.
But if power is out, then that generally means the kitchen isn’t functioning either unless the restaurant has generators
Yeah, credit cards were originally similar to checks in how they were handled by stores and restaurants. I loved those old clunky sliding machines that you put the cards into and KACHUNKed it onto a carbon copy receipt!
That could be illegal in certain countries
I mean, the alternative is… holding them as prisioners?