Square-shaped hole in workers' wallets after payment system fails at peak tip time Square's payment system malfunctioned over the weekend for several hours, a glitch that cost workers at affected businesses a meaningful portion of their earnings during the most lucrative day of the week. The company's status page at IsSquareUp.com tells the clinical part of the story. There were multiple service issues on …
I am unaware of a single case where the issuing bank owns the credit card network who in turn owns the acquirer who in turn owns the merchant.
Acquirers (and payment facilitators like Square) have outages from time to time, both large scale and small scale... although the small scale outages are probably becoming harder to find simply because "hard line" connections back to the acquirer aren't used much any more and instead the transaction data flows over internet to the acquirer's gateway.
Issuing banks have outages as well. Credit card networks are probably the most resilient of all the parts that make transactions possible.
This isn't a "cloud" problem so much as a "payment processor" problem. Even if Square hosted their equipment in their own data center, this issue might well have arisen, since it sounds like the issue was bad code. Might as well ask "How's that electronic payment processing thing working out for you?" On balance, I suspect it's working out great, which is why it's so ubiquitous (barring the inevitable commentards who I'm sure will come in to twat on about how they've only ever carried cash ever since the Great Visa Outage of '88).
I actually experienced the US tipping policy directly.
When in Boston, a group of us went for a Chinese meal, the food was okay (if a little lukewarm) but the service was absolutely dire (possibly leading to the food temperature).
Being aware of the tipping situation in the US, we duly left a tip (which we wouldn't have in the UK as they really didn't deserve one) of 10%, only to have the Manager chase after us shouting "You didn't tip enough, my staff need to live" to which we replied, "Then pay them enough to give decent service!"
A tip should be exactly that, a recognition of good service, *not* part of the wages.
Federal law requires that an employer "make up" the any "lost" wages between the tipped wage and the minimum wage of $7.25/hr. Federal tipped wage is $2.13/hour
For example, if a tipped employee works for 10 hours (just to keep the maths easy), their tipped wage for that period will be $21.30. If their tips do not exceed $51.20 (72.50 - 21.30), then the employer is required to pay the difference.
That is federal law, which is the floor for wages in the US. Many states exceed federal law, in both terms of minimum wage and tipped wage.
So, to your point - most likely that manager was running out because they knew they were going to have to come up with the difference... especially of the place was slow or they had too many people working.
My better half used to like working a few off-shifts bartending each month to keep her skills up. I'd audit her paystubs from time to time (it's the accountant in me that causes this disease) and tell her that her employer is shorting her - in that they were not making up the difference.
She chose not to push the issue for fear of retaliation, plus it was honestly a negligible amount given the trivial amount of hours she worked there - usually just a few dollars. However, the payroll provider is a massive company and I have to assume that all tipped employees at that employer are being given that same shaft that my better half was given. It is possible that the other full time employees are getting shafted harder, although my better half wasn't working prime-time shifts.
And if this massive payroll company allows one employer to flaunt wage laws, I have to image they allow everyone else to do so as well. Two decades ago it was much easier to weasel around this law because credit/debit cards didn't make up as much of the transactions as it does today, which means there's a proper paper trail.
The US minimum wage is pathetically low with a reliance on charity in the form of tips. Staff are not performing seals. Pay them a decent wage.
Much prefer Japan, where tips are taboo. You will not be asked for any and none will be expected of you there. You pay your exact fare to a taxi driver and get change. A tip free nation where high standards of service are expected as the default.
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