Found out 60% of small biz owners in Detroit don't have a backup plan for their POS system

I was at a meetup last month for local shop owners and someone mentioned a stat from a Detroit chamber of commerce survey. It said 6 out of 10 small businesses here have zero plan if their card reader or register goes down for more than a day. That blew my mind because I lost a full Saturday of sales last year when my Square terminal froze up. I keep a cheap offline card imprinter now, but I'm curious how many of you have a manual backup or just hope for the best?

3 comments

3 Comments

knight.dylan29d ago

That knuckle buster is honestly probably better than my current "backup plan" which is basically me frantically googling "how to accept credit cards without a machine" while customers just stare at me like I'm performing open heart surgery. I bought a little carbon paper imprint thing off Amazon for like 25 bucks and it's just been sitting in my glove box for six months collecting dust from my car's drive-thru coffee spills. At least your eBay find has a better chance of working than my plan B which is literally taking payments via Venmo on my personal phone and hoping nobody scams me.

michael6691mo ago

My cousin runs a t-shirt shop in Ferndale and he told me last winter his card reader died in the middle of a big holiday market. He ended up writing down credit card numbers on a napkin and typing them in later... that felt risky to me. I got an old knuckle buster off eBay for like 40 bucks just to have something physical to fall back on.

uma_williams1mo ago

And that's a smart backup actually, especially since those old imprint machines don't need power or wifi like a card reader does... @michael669's cousin would have been better off with that napkin.