Shoppers abandon carts at Loblaws as debit process crashes

Loblaws was struck Monday with a failure of debit — no transactions were possible with the popular form of payment. Some reports said that only cash was being accepted, but others said some credit cards were working. (Bulldog co-publisher successfully purchased groceries at Valumart on Bayview using an RBC Credit Card during the outage.)  These unexpected foul-ups caught many converts to the cashless society flat-footed. As seen above, shopping carts full of groceries were abandoned at the checkout. Nothing like having 10 or 15 green $20 images of her majesty in your purse or pocket when the tap and pay goes down. One wag said that soon we will be able to tell our phone to print some paper money. “Don’t waste your time @LoblawsON tonight — been to 2 stores and CC and Debit are down… does anybody even carry cash anymore?” said one tweet. “Just in case I’m not the last to know this, all debit and credit machines for Loblaws are down in Atlantic Canada. Dominion is cash only,” tweeted another shopper. Customers are notified by in-store announcements over the PA system. On Mar. 22, Shopper’s Drug Mart had a computer outage affecting 1,300 locations that lasted more than two days.