Archived Version 45 and Why It Didn't Help

[averagetm]

Here we are, or I guess, here I am. Basically a year later. If you don't remember me, I posted a beautiful guide to the introduction to Version 43 back in July last year as Chip Cards were being rolled out. Now we are Version 45.120, the latest release in the failure for Target to unify its technology.

What are the issues?
1. Get change sometimes doesn't let you and says its all $20
2. We still don't have a way to easily grant missed Cartwheel deals. (Why.)
3. Registers still cache everything (More on this later)
4. The UX is still butt.
5. Causing more crashes than Version 43, which I didn't think was possible. (I think 43.120 fixed most of those)

Version 45 didn't fix much on my end, besides a couple issues with Card Readers. There were no major feature pushes, in fact Self-Checkout doesn't have Version 45 yet and with the amount of issues Self-Checkout has we have to retrieve them on the 1 Register that is still on Version 43. I'll go through what I mean with each of my points and I'd love to elaborate more if requested.

In Response to 1: If you haven't encountered this bug, then you haven't lived. If you K2 to Get Change it will all switch to $20 bill and you have to shut your register to restart it.

2. So, this is a bit ridiculous. We are still forced to manually do missed coupons for Cartwheels that don't work. With Target pushing Cartwheel more than ever, this needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

3. What I mean is, that Registers still hold a ridiculous amount of information which should be solved with the introduction of highly efficient Cloud-Based Technology in the past 6 years. Without this, Registers are slow at reading information and this is becoming blatantly obvious in Version 45 as my registers have only gotten slower with this update.

4. This is obvious, but I took the pleasure of redesigning the UX myself in a notebook last year, which turned out quite nice and User-Friendly. A big one here is scalability, the Target Cafe Registers use higher resolution screens because they are Touchscreen and with the most recent update there's this weird fat red bar at the top.

I don't know what to say. I know what the work conditions are at HQ for the POS programmers and I know they aren't ideal and there aren't enough of them. We aren't getting updates quick enough, and we aren't getting updates that are necessary to keep functioning. As a programmer and a Team Lead at Target it's apparent what needs to be fixed and Target is blind to what we are running into Store-side.

 

[Hardlinesmaster]

I remember you. You were great on the updates. Thanks for your hard work. You are not alone here.
v43 POS Changes - What to expect!
18.4 Summer MyDevice/PDA Update

 

[averagetm]

I remember you. You were great on the updates. Thanks for your hard work. You are e not alone here.
v43 POS Changes - What to expect!
18.4 Summer MyDevice/PDA Update

Thank you! I hope to continue to provide updates when I can.

 

[Firefox]

Thankfully, since I've left the front end I haven't had to deal with the registers anymore. However, dealing with constantly crashing registers immediately after the chip update will forever haunt my dreams. Out of our 24 registers, during peak hours we would have anywhere from 8-12 registers offline at any given moment. Either they would crash, card reader would stop working, there would be a "no peripheral device" error, would refuse to boot, and one particular one would BSOD as well.

There was one occasion where I was the closing GSA and our STL was closing, and at around 8pm we had a massive rush, and had to call for all hands on deck. However, because of the version 43 update, over half of our registers were down and the lines were leading into softlines. What a nightmare.

 

[Retail Girl]

Issue 1 with the get change thing has been happening since I first started at Target 4 years ago. You haven't lived until you've had to try requesting $700 worth of 20s, but it turns out to be impossible to do because it takes you five or ten tries just to request it once....much less enough to do it enough times to request all that money.

(And for those of you who are going to ask, it happened a couple of times on cash returns at guest services....nothing untoward, but a problem when we were already low on cash).

 

[Tar Ghetto]

Issue 1 with the get change thing has been happening since I first started at Target 4 years ago.

I was gonna comment the same thing! Lol. Hopefully new registers will fix some issues.

 

[SFSFun]

I know what the work conditions are at HQ for the POS programmers

I thought a lot of it was done at Target India?

 

[mrknownothing]

1. That's been happening since I was a cashier using the dinosaur IBM registers ~5 years ago. Always annoyed the crap out of me when I wanted to submit a quick change request before starting to ring a guest's items.

2. Seriously, how the hell is that not a thing yet? It should've been done when Cartwheel first rolled out.

3. If Spot ever decides to switch to a cloud-based system for handling POS info, they need to first improve the store-side network infrastructure. As it is, the PDAs and MyDevices are inexcusably slow (that is, when they're actually connected to the network), and the processing power of the POS units doesn't do much good if the sales/transaction info is being transferred more slowly than frozen molasses.

 

[Flabbergasted]

All these large retailers need to completely redesign their crappy POS systems in ways that are customer/guest and retail employee friendly. I thought Target's POS was bad and then I started working at Lowe's and y'all don't even know how bad it can be. The Lowe's system makes even less sense and I'm pretty sure was coded sometime in the 1980s.

I know these companies hate spending money and all but upgrading the POS systems is very much worth investing in. A smoother running system is possible and would save a lot of time and headache.

 

[NPC]

I have a weird issue I'd like to bring up. When doing a return for a same day purchases from another store, we have to type in the information manually, including tax. If the tax is a flat number like 8% or 9%, there's no problem. But if it's a number like 8.25%, the register won't let me type numbers after the decimal. So in cases where the tax is like that, I round up to 9, so at least I'm not shorting the guest.

 

[Retail Girl]

Ugh. So it no longer acknowledges when you hit the decimal point on the keyboard? What a pain.

 

[BoxCutter]

I noticed how long it now takes to process when you hit the "cash" payment option. It used to be instantaneous, now I'm waiting a few seconds for the denomination screen to pop up.

 

[Yetive]

The touch screen in Sbux takes forever. I can get 5 drinks made faster than I can ring them up.

 

[averagetm]

I thought a lot of it was done at Target India?

I know there's quite a few POS programmers in a cold basement at Target HQ.

 

[shortstuffishere]

Does your registers also have a hard time reading the ID's when ringing up age restricted items? Half the time or sometimes more it'll keep asking for it after scanning so we have to manually type it in.

 

[averagetm]

I noticed how long it now takes to process when you hit the "cash" payment option. It used to be instantaneous, now I'm waiting a few seconds for the denomination screen to pop up.

Yea, its absurd how slow V45 is.

The touch screen in Sbux takes forever. I can get 5 drinks made faster than I can ring them up.

Also a relatively new issue.

3. If Spot ever decides to switch to a cloud-based system for handling POS info, they need to first improve the store-side network infrastructure. As it is, the PDAs and MyDevices are inexcusably slow (that is, when they're actually connected to the network), and the processing power of the POS units doesn't do much good if the sales/transaction info is being transferred more slowly than frozen molasses.

On this note, this could be solved relatively easily. A lot of it has to do with how the registers handle data which is absurdly old. And moving to a cloud-based network would take the load off. Our current registers nor POS system is new enough to do this but the benefit is overwhelming.

 

[averagetm]

Does your registers also have a hard time reading the ID's when ringing up age restricted items? Half the time or sometimes more it'll keep asking for it after scanning so we have to manually type it in.

As far as I'm aware that's a Version 43 bug. It happens most often at Guest Service registers for obvious reasons.

 

[shortstuffishere]

As far as I'm aware that's a Version 43 bug. It happens most often at Guest Service registers for obvious reasons.

Lmao don't even get me started on those ones.

 

[mrknownothing]

I noticed how long it now takes to process when you hit the "cash" payment option. It used to be instantaneous, now I'm waiting a few seconds for the denomination screen to pop up.

You use the denomination screen? I've always just typed in the amount at the payment screen, then hit K1 Cash. One less step for the POS to deal with.

 

[BullseyeBabe]

The card readers will not work sometimes. If we suspend the transaction then scan the suspend slip that usually fixes it. However, sometimes when we do that we get error messages when we try to scan the suspend slip. When that happens we have to rering everything on another register. It's very random and restarting the register usually fixes it.
Also, when we scan an ID it takes a really long time for the register to talk the info from it.

 

[BoxCutter]

You use the denomination screen? I've always just typed in the amount at the payment screen, then hit K1 Cash. One less step for the POS to deal with.

We were once told that picking the amount on the denomination screen menu helps with keeping your cashier score green. True or not, who knows? But I've been doing it that way for close to 10 years.

 

[shortstuffishere]

You use the denomination screen? I've always just typed in the amount at the payment screen, then hit K1 Cash. One less step for the POS to deal with.

Even when you type it in it still takes forever.

 

[NPC]

Ugh. So it no longer acknowledges when you hit the decimal point on the keyboard? What a pain.

Who knows when that will be fixed. It doesn't register zeros either, so I can't type 008.25. Instead it comes out as 825.000. I don't know if it's even a well known issue, since only GS deals with it, and it's still not that common.

 

[KingBear]

I noticed how long it now takes to process when you hit the "cash" payment option. It used to be instantaneous, now I'm waiting a few seconds for the denomination screen to pop up.

I really thought this was just our equipment; I've been cracking the joke lately that the computer was taking longer to calculate the change than I was.

Had a card reader suddenly disconnect from one of my registers at closing last night, with two lanes open and all other registers closed because I didn't expect the card reader to suddenly stop talking to the machine. That was a thrill and a half. I've noticed a few card readers doing that lately but I don't know if that's just cables or related to all this.

Is there a changelog on Workbench for register updates? I know when 45 rolled out, we all got blindsided because we had to suspend and bring up transactions and suddenly learned that only one register worked after that point. Some forewarning or information would be super cool, even if the updates don't seem to make anything better.

 

[SFSFun]

Is there a changelog on Workbench for register updates?

There's been something on redwire about a "POS stability and enhancements update" for at least a week or two.