I think the point people are trying and failing to make is that asking for half of means sales is half of revenue not half of net and that you’re out of your goddamned mind if you think a store with razor thin margins would sell at a massive loss rather than just close due to connectivity problems.

Your responses imply that you think people are questioning whether you would lose money on the deal while we are instead saying you’ll get laughed out of the store, or possibly asked never to come back.

They're all run on a shoestring:

1: I doubt they're "with it" enough to put together a backup arrangement for internet.

2: Their internet problems are probably due to a cheapo router, loose wire, ect.

3: The employees probably like the break.

Unfortunately they are largely corporate, which is how they can sell items for such a cheap price. The store manager probably has zero say in nearly anything. Even if they wanted to "break the rules," I doubt they could make use of your connection as a backup, but I've also worked for smaller companies that were able to sell internet access to individual locations like Denny's and various large hotels in the US. Being able to somehow share sales would be the difficult part, since all sales are reported back to corporate.

Good luck if you make this work for you, it would be exciting to hear about if you're able to get them to work with you.

All my limited knowledge about retail is that losing money in Q4 means you’re dead. Are they fundamentally different than retail?

After having my credit card locked by stupid fraud prevention algorithms on my honeymoon, I had a long chat with them before going overseas a second time.

And that was the day Visa had a full on outage. We would walk into one shop, try to buy stuff, get declined, then go into the next and get accepted because they were running in offline mode.

Got a nice big bill from my cellphone carrier for making the call to visa to ask them wtf as well.

My card tied to my main financial institution have the raised digits, but most cards you'd sign up for online now no longer have the raised digits (and often allow you to select art to appear on the card face).

My credit union has been behind for a while. I think I had an embossed one until about nine years ago. Six at the latest. Still doesn’t have NFC in it.

> kachunk-kachunk credit card machines

How aptly descriptive.

It's hit or miss. My (brand new) bank card and chase credit card are raised. But my other credit cards are flat.

These stores appear everywhere, even in areas with high income. You'd be surprised, but often people with those high incomes shop for certain products at very low rates, and that's how they keep their savings. A good example is garbage bags. Most people don't care too much about the quality of their garbage bags, unless they rip on the way to the bin.