This afternoon was going to be big for many newsagents with Powerball at $80M. Unfortunately for many last-minute punters who rely on using their debit and cards for payment, an EFTPOS outage that hit mid afternoon is a barrier to getting a ticket. This will hurt retailers, plenty of whom rostered on extra staff for the traffic surge.
The banks point to Telstra. Telstra has acknowledged a problem. That does not fix it.
Being a Thursday, a pay day for plenty, complicates things.
Within our channel, the loss of Powerball sales from mid afternoon to close will be at a cost. Maybe the lottery gods will smile upon everyone and delivery a jackpot to next week. $100M would kick things along.
We must have won the Telstra Lottery today – no outage for EFTPOS here!
Worst timing for sure, but we only lost one customer to online, he was cardless. He couldn’t buy lotto or dinner.
Atm’s near us charging $2/$2.50 made a fortune.
Until the telcos and banks can make their systems more reliable I can’t see going cashless as a good thing for most businesses…