A glimpse of the dystopian nightmare of a cashless society and a great big global ‘serves you right’ to those businesses now refusing notes and coins – that’s how anti-cashless campaigners have been summarising the major IT meltdown of last week.

The frothy-mouthed Daily Mail was quick to claim the outage proved “the perils of going cashless”. Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers – strawberry punnet aloft, pushing a pocketful of coins across the counter at a checkout-less Aldi store – will no doubt be feeling vindicated.

It was undoubtedly disruptive. The outage disabled 8.5 million computers worldwide, Microsoft estimates. On the grocery front, it downed card readers across several supermarkets and convenience stores, and threw a digital spanner in the operations of manufacturers and logistics companies.

As Birmingham Business School’s Professor John Bryson put it: “The world has experienced its first digital pandemic.” The lower end of the estimated insured loss of the outage has been put at $1bn by Burns & Wilcox.

There will be an aftershock. For some it will be a P&L hit in the next results. For others it could be simply that a once loyal customer was forced to buy coffee and cake from the rival next door. And liked it.

How were supermarkets affected by global IT outage?

But despite its scale, more commerce than not continued completely unaffected, and those that were impacted were back up and running again in next to no time. In major supermarkets, at worst, it meant chip & PIN had to be used in place of contactless. The digital systems are not infallible, but are reassuringly resilient. And you can bet they’ll be even more so after this latest incident.

The prospect of a cashless society is a favourite bogeyman of the likes of GB News and Nigel Farage (paranoid conspiracy theorists are a core demographic). It is a means for the deep state or whoever really runs the world to track and control your life. “If we’re not careful, we head towards a Chinese-style social credit system, where unless you go along with the views of the day, you become a non-person,” Farage has said.

GB News has an ongoing campaign – Don’t Kill Cash – which has gathered 310,000 signatures demanding the protection of cash as legal tender since “vulnerable people who rely on cash are increasingly being left behind by the relentless march of technology”.

Cash, though, has a cost, of course, to grocery and consumers alike. It must be handled, banked, transported and secured. For every global IT outage there are countless muggings, thefts and break-ins that don’t down planes but do devastate.

Paying by card is more convenient for most, on both sides of the transaction. But retailers must keep in mind those that are less easy with card payments and technology in general.

Supermarket loyalty scheme smartphone access

Earlier this month a shopper called The Grocer to complain about Lidl’s loyalty offering – and its inaccessibility to anyone without a smartphone. The discounter’s offers on sausages were especially appealing – a favourite meal of her grandchildren – but not available to her without the app. Unlike supermarkets, which offer loyalty membership in physical card or key fob form as well, Lidl’s is app-only. The stores response to the phone-less? Tough luck: “Using it is only possible with smartphones with internet access.”

Disappointed, she has now vowed to shop elsewhere.

Research this month from home care provider Home Instead found 77% of the older people surveyed said technology should be easier to use.

Margaret Newson, 88, from Tunbridge Wells, was quoted in the survey: “You get to a point in your life where you cease to exist as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Being excluded like this really is like being cancelled – you feel that you are no longer invited to the party.”

The global IT outage won’t stop or even slow the shift towards cashless. But those that prefer physical money as a payment option, who might become overwhelmed at a self-checkout and perhaps aren’t so savvy with smartphones, shouldn’t be ignored or railroaded into alternatives by retailers. That would be a far more chilling system error.

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