I've never been to a retail establishment with anything close to the credit card speed of CFA. The cashier can swipe and grab receipt in one smooth and quick motion. It's so fast you feel like it's broken or slight of hand.
I wonder how they do it or why other companies can't or don't do it. CFA stores are so much busier than even an average McDonald's, maybe the efficiency gains are just worth more.
From what I understand, merchants can do a quicker swipe (basically record the card # and transaction amount without waiting for authorization), but the merchant fees are slightly higher because of the possible higher fraud/chargeback rate. It's up to the chain to decide on what to do.
Perhaps CFA can do it even better since they could possibly keep a database of bad cards at the edge. Remember those books that cashiers used to thumb through to verify if a card was stolen?
If it's a repeat customer, at the same location, then you can avoid contacting the payment processor gateway, and just record the transaction on the local cluster for later payment processing. The expected value of the loss if someone stole their card, and used it at the same restaurant that they frequent as a regular, after the card was canceled, and the restaurant gave the thief a chicken sandwich, and now corporate needs to eat that cost because the asynchronous CC transaction doesn't go through when they finally run it... is absolutely miniscule.
The one place where CFA IT seems to fall down is at the drive-through.
I used to be able to pay for my order with the order taker on his/her iPad using my Apple Watch.
For the last six months or so, I have to go all the way to the pick-up window, and they have to get a manager to unplug a card swipe terminal from the front counter, plug it in near the window, log in to the terminal, and then hang the actual terminal out of the window so I can tap my watch.
Very strange. Hopefully it's only a problem at the one CFA in my geographic area.
Sounds like it would be fun to be on your team, but my work lies on the other end of the equipment chain. I do OEM work for the fryers and grills, and boy could they use a kick in the pants from the chains to get their act together.
