You are absolutely correct, and I should have been more specific.

Our quotes are good for 30 days, and we were outside of that time frame. We would have been within our right to adjust prices at that point.

Same here. We sold several computer systems at our original quoted price, and just ate the price increase from our vendors.

Had the same thing happen on one of my servers. Got up one day a few weeks ago and the server was suspended (luckily the hosting provider unsuspended it for me quickly).

It’s mostly business sites, but we do have an old personal blog on there with a lot of travel pictures on it, and 4 or 5 AI bots were just pounding it. Went from 300GB per month average to 5TB on August, and 10/11 TB in September and October.

That tile work was on the building before it was converted. But it might have helped when they were selecting the location.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Trump+Burger+MAGA+of+Flatonia/@29.6877595,-97.1089339,3a,75y,11.4h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s-0mu3vluRo5pCgck_Br0Rw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0%26panoid%3D-0mu3vluRo5pCgck_Br0Rw%26yaw%3D11.398638!7i16384!8i8192!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x864375a9d25ce89f:0x50e2dee0153dffb0!2sTrump+Burger+MAGA+of+Flatonia!8m2!3d29.6879272!4d-97.1088986!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11wnbhqwfq!3m5!1s0x864375a9d25ce89f:0x50e2dee0153dffb0!8m2!3d29.6879272!4d-97.1088986!16s%2Fg%2F11wnbhqwfq?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTExNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

We were driving somewhere and suddenly decided to order some chicken on the way home (figured it would be done when we got there and we wouldn’t have to wait).

They required an app: my wife downloaded it, set up an account, picked the store that was on the way home (but not closest to where we were) and put the order into the app, only to have it fail sending it to the location.

Several times.

By the third try we were in the parking lot and I just went in and ordered.

I’m sure it’s a mixed bag, with plenty of small companies jumping in.

I own a very small company, but I also write a lot of our code, and we’re not touching anything “AI”. Not in our code, not in our products, not in any system we can keep it out of: We just migrated our last server from Azure a couple of weeks ago, we’re dumping MS Office this year, and starting the long slow migration from Windows desktop to Linux as an option for our customers (we’ve long been Linux on our servers, but have a lot of desktop software that needs to stay on the desktop).

But it’s everywhere. I had a call from our phone system vendor a couple of weeks ago. He kept trying to sell me their new AI call attendant, and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t subject our customers to that BS. It’s been forced into our accounting software, billing software, cloud backup, everywhere you look it’s there now.

You were right about the rounding / keeping the extra … it’s just someone different keeping the extra money.

Lots of those Canadian quarters floating around in FL when we lived there.

Yea, we can process 4 different tax rates, and always list them separately.

The exception is in locations where tax is included in the price: bars that take a lot of cash tend to want to make everything even dollars, or quarters at the most, so that bartenders don’t have to make a lot of change, and can work quickly.

In these situations, we have to do the calculation backwards after the fact, but it’s still tracked as a separate tax in software.

I’m an owner, so make many decisions (but I also have smart employees who’s opinions I trust very much).

This is a tough one to deal with, especially with smaller Android based handheld devices. In the 5" to 6" range we can get a few different things (wholesale costs):

• $150 - $200 dollar trash that will fail in a short period of time (Chinese imports direct from Alibaba / the manufacturer). << we don’t sell these.
• $300 to $400 devices, with similar hardware specs to the cheaper ones, but better made to last a couple of years (both of these classes are slow, and a bit under-powered)
• $900+ devices that are fast and well made.

You can guess which ones we sell the most of. Especially since they tend to get dropped, or lost quite a bit (we’re in the restaurant POS business).

For the stationary (15" Android) terminals, the situation is similar. But we sell these devices more than the handhelds, and after a few installs with well made but slower hardware, my tech lead ruled out offering the cheaper ones in favor of selling the ones with better specs, so that’s where we are now.

But lots of our competitors give hardware away to get the credit card processing revenue (a total rip off for the customer, but it’s the nature of the game), so they use the cheapest option.

I write POS software, and have written tax calculations that cover about 30 states, and several CA provinces.

While we do have to round (always up) when calculating sales tax, there’s no way for the business to figure out how much that rounding would be, since it’s just added to the tax collected.

And in all states that I’ve worked with, a business has to pay what they collected (even if they over collect), and can’t just calculate a percentage of total sales (since many states have tax tables, rounding rules, or 3-4 decimal tax rates, and not a flat percentage tax).

So it’s actually the government that gets the benefit of the rounding.

Oh true, I forget I am on mobile usually for YouTube.

On Android the same combo of Firefox / uBlock works quite well, but of course the experience isn’t quite the same as it is in the app.

30 years ago I did 12 hour shifts at a factory, and it really wasn’t too bad. It was 4 on 3 off one week, and 3 on 4 off the other week. The OT on week one made up for the lost hours on week two, and having 3 or 4 days off was pretty sweet. But it was a QC job, for a European company in the US, sitting all night inspecting small parts, and was pretty chill.

My brother in law worked at the BMW factory in SC, and they did 4 10 hour shifts, with the days off rotating each week. They only ran 6 days a week, so you’d end up with 5 days off every 4 weeks whenever the days off from two weeks lined up. He liked the 5 days off when they happened, but the rotating days off didn’t line up with my sisters schedule, so that was tough.

@

uBlock Origin on Firefox certainly works. There was a short period of about 5 days (a couple of months ago) where they were blocking playback with uBlock enabled, but it didn’t last long.