There was an announcement shortly after 3pm this afternoon at the Auchan’s in Cluj. It was in Romanian, but here is a rough translation.
“Dear shoppers. We are sorry to inform you that we cannot accept payment by card at the moment. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.”
Okay, so there is some artistic liberty with that translation. It seemed shorter than that, yet just as polite.
At first, shoppers didn’t seem to act any differently. But soon, you could see shoppers taking out their wallets and counting their money.
Assistants were walking to the card payment lines, to warn customers. However, a few customers insisted on having their products rang up. More specificially, they lined up there, and stayed there despite the warning. It was all very quiet and peaceful, but looked like a rebellion compared to the way shoppers normally act in Cluj. (One has to remind oneself that Romanian is a Latin language, it is spoken so quietly at times.)
The lines that accepted cash payment were inordinately long, as shoppers waiting for each other to pay small amounts with small bills.
A few shopping baskets were left full, abandoned throughout the store, as shoppers who didn’t have enough cash had no way to pay for them. (No one asked each other to borrow money or any of that. The occasional beggars who walk through the store were nowhere to be seen.)
We didn’t see any phones out, as shoppers used their brains to figure out ways to deal with the situation. Would Google know what to do? OpenAI? Gemini? Your gemini third cousin in rural New Jersey or Apahida? No one seemed to think so, although there was the brief text message sent, perhaps telling people back home they would be late as they waited to pay.
One solution, of course, was to take money out and return with cash. Another was to leave and shop somewhere else.
Was it “chaos?” Hardly. It was all quite orderly. One had the feeling many shoppers had been here before, even if quite a few showed a lack of patience through their quiet actions.
A few shoppers stumbled to pay with cash, and those behind such shoppers often changed lines. No one was hurt, no one was killed, no one yelled or cried. No, this wasn’t New Jersey, this was Cluj Napoca, Romania, on a “Black Friday” Wednesday in 2025. The twelf of November shall forever be forgotten as the day the card machine did not work.