Cash registers crash at Petsmart The Arizona Republic March 2, 2000

A computer glitch knocked out Petsmart Inc.'s electronic cash registers for five to eight hours Wednesday, forcing the company to compute transactions manually at its 500 stores.

The Phoenix-based pet supplies and services chain said it didn't believe the crash of its recently installed National Cash Register Point of Sale system was related to a "Leap Year bug." The company said a handful of stores was forced to cut back operations briefly to adjust for manual checkouts.

Phil Francis, Petsmart's chairman and chief executive, said the breakdown came during one of the company's slowest sales days of the week. He said the loss of revenue shouldn't greatly hurt the company's first-quarter results.

Francis added that Petsmart is diagnosing its systems to find and eliminate the cause of the problem. http://www.azcentral.com/news/0302petsmart.shtml

-- Antoine Neron (metis@2000now.org), March 02, 2000

Answers

More info at http://news.excite.com/news/pr/000301/az-petsmart-pos-halt The third paragraph is funny.

-- Antoine Neron (metis@2000now.org), March 02, 2000.