Ours are big and take forever..



  • (Customer support complaining about the receipts printing to the IT staff)



    The receipts are still not printing, this is getting ridiculous!

    We are arguing with customers for nothing!

    Customers are comparing us with XXXX (name of another company) that their receipts are small and come out easy.

    Ours are big and take forever..


  • Garbage Person

     Sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Your system takes ages to print a receipt (whether that's due to slow printers, a slow backend, or whatever is beyond the information given) and uses some sort of large format receipt which isn't standard for the industry.

     

    Mind you it's HIGHLY likely IT has no meaningful influence over receipt formats or printer vendors, but that's life.



  • How do they know how big the receipts are? I thought they weren't printing...?



  • I think the WTF is that the paper format of their receipts is probably not the bottleneck causing the delays.</p>



  • Garbage Person

     It is if he works for a grocery store, cell phone company, or electronics store. Bloody 9000ft long receipts for 5 items.



  • @Weng said:

    Bloody 9000ft long receipts
     

    A thousand 9-foot paper cuts!



  • I often get the same complaint. . . .



  •  Best Buy prints some long-ass receipts, but they come out fairly rapidly.

    Walmart has the best receipt printers; they play this little song due to the (as far as I can tell) feed speed changing based on the complexity of the current area of the receipt. If I worked there I'd be trying to figure it out so I could make the receipt printers play music...



  • Am I the only one sensing a lot of innuendo in the OP?



  •  How else are they going to let you know that you could havec saved 5 cents if you'd used your club card, you accrued 32 gas credits, your cashier's name was jodie, and the floral department has a big sale coming up? oh, and also you bought a pack of gum.



  • @Weng said:

     It is if he works for a grocery store, cell phone company, or electronics store. Bloody 9000ft long receipts for 5 items.

    Try getting something at Fry's Electronics that's not stocked on the open shelves.  Multi-page letter-sized sheets for each such item.

    And you have to show it to them at the door.



  • I have a similar story. I used to work for NCR (National Cash Register) and one of our customers told me this story.

    Back in the day (probably meaning in the early to mid 80s), their receipts would print each item to the receipt as it was scanned. Then, at the end, the receipt was already printed in full, so the customer didn't have to wait. The only problem was, that it was actually slower to do that back then because the communication with the printer was the bottleneck. Someone figured this out and updated the software to print the entire receipt at the end so there'd be less comm. overhead. The customer thought this was great because they could get an additional x number of their customers through checkout in a day, meaning more profits! And they did! There was just one problem - their customers hated it. Their customers couldn't tell the difference between a 1 minute checkout and a 1 minute and 10 second checkout, and they felt like after the checker was done scanning, that they had to just sit there and wait for their receipt to print. After getting dozens of complaints, our customer asked us to put it back to the old way, and we did. Now their customers were wasting more time and they were making slightly less money per day, but everyone appeared happy!



  • @dcardani said:

    I have a similar story. I used to work for NCR (National Cash Register) and one of our customers told me this story.

    Back in the day (probably meaning in the early to mid 80s), their receipts would print each item to the receipt as it was scanned. Then, at the end, the receipt was already printed in full, so the customer didn't have to wait. The only problem was, that it was actually slower to do that back then because the communication with the printer was the bottleneck. Someone figured this out and updated the software to print the entire receipt at the end so there'd be less comm. overhead. The customer thought this was great because they could get an additional x number of their customers through checkout in a day, meaning more profits! And they did! There was just one problem - their customers hated it. Their customers couldn't tell the difference between a 1 minute checkout and a 1 minute and 10 second checkout, and they felt like after the checker was done scanning, that they had to just sit there and wait for their receipt to print. After getting dozens of complaints, our customer asked us to put it back to the old way, and we did. Now their customers were wasting more time and they were making slightly less money per day, but everyone appeared happy!

     

    Nobody thought to buffer the writes x number of items at a time?



  • PC LOAD BANNER



  • @vt_mruhlin said:

    Nobody thought to buffer the writes x number of items at a time?

    I'm guessing here, but probably they figured that they had spent enough money making the system better. If the customer wanted it worse again, they could just revert the source to the previous version, recompile, and be done with it. (Or maybe the customer who told me the story got it wrong. I don't know.)



  • @dcardani said:

    I have a similar story. I used to work for NCR (National Cash Register) and one of our customers told me this story.

    Back in the day (probably meaning in the early to mid 80s), their receipts would print each item to the receipt as it was scanned. Then, at the end, the receipt was already printed in full, so the customer didn't have to wait. The only problem was, that it was actually slower to do that back then because the communication with the printer was the bottleneck. Someone figured this out and updated the software to print the entire receipt at the end so there'd be less comm. overhead. The customer thought this was great because they could get an additional x number of their customers through checkout in a day, meaning more profits! And they did! There was just one problem - their customers hated it. Their customers couldn't tell the difference between a 1 minute checkout and a 1 minute and 10 second checkout, and they felt like after the checker was done scanning, that they had to just sit there and wait for their receipt to print. After getting dozens of complaints, our customer asked us to put it back to the old way, and we did. Now their customers were wasting more time and they were making slightly less money per day, but everyone appeared happy!

     Wal-Mart did that for years. When I was a cashier there (mid to late 90s) they printed out each item as you scanned it. And it was definitely the bottleneck. Although I can't imagine that waiting at the end for the entire receipt to print out was an issue, because I remember scanning entire orders and then waiting for the printer to catch up with me. Plus if you scanned something and then took it off later you would have one line with the item added and then 20 lines later have the removal. That confused people quite a bit. 


  • @Zecc said:

    Am I the only one sensing a lot of innuendo in the OP?

    I thought that was the whole point of the thread.



  • @PeriSoft said:

    If I worked there I'd be trying to figure it out so I could make the receipt printers play music...
    "A Simple Text File" by "Man Or Astroman?", as played on an Apple ImageWriter II — just like the band would have. ☺


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