Whatever is true about where we’d like to be we are here right now, and here includes a number of decisions made in the past:
The Japanese government has pledged to suspend an 8% sales tax on food but says it is being thwarted by an unexpected opponent – uncooperative cash registers.
According to the devices’ manufacturers, the systems at big retail chains that process everything from cash to cardless transactions were never designed to calculate a tax rate of zero and so they require a major overhaul that could take up to a year.
The software just never was designed for a 0% tax rate. So, it would have to be programmed in – not a trivial operation across the whole netweok. This is Japan, so, yes, I do believe the explanation.
This is a specific of the more general – what we can do now is constrained by what people did back then.
Fun, eh?
Cash Registers! Things that do ding, really, in 2026. Not just change one program online?
PS. Its so hot I got up at dawn, I’ve now read all the emails and blogs, had enough cups of tea, and its still only 7:20,
I manfully stayed in bed until 6am, just to say I didnt get up at 4.30. I am only on my third cup, though.
I have one of those airfilters in the bedroom, it works really well – there is a lot of dust in my old house – and it keeps the place cool, but the noise works its way into my dreams and they become even more surreal than usual.
You should worry. The night before last I dreamed that I removed both of my kidneys.
Deveriled kidneys?
Very good!
With a spoon ?
Better than using a JCB, I suppose.
I have no real comment. I just want it on the record that I got up at 5:40AM and have had two cups of tea.
I was up at 05:30 as usual and opened all the windows leaving the curtains on the sunny side closed. When I went in to the kitchen which is north facing at 08:00 for breakfast I had to put a jumper on.
I’m playing golf at 12:15 in an inter club match which I suspect is going to be more a test of stamina than golf skills, especially as the last 6 holes are quite hilly.
Tuesday is usually a working party on Naphill Common – we’re currently clearing holly and brambles rather than working in the dew ponds (a winter job when amphibians are mostly absent). But the leader sensibly cancelled it – a bunch of geriatrics doing manual labour at midday in current temperatures isn’t a good idea, even under the shade of beech trees.
Sensible move. Someone fainted on the golf course before we started.
Fortunately my opponent conceded after 11 holes, which is next to the clubhouse, as I was well ahead and he didn’t want to play the hilly part of the course, which pleased me for 2 reasons:
I’m playing at 8:30 tomorrow and he is an extremely portly gentleman who has obviously enjoyed a lot of beers in the past and I didn’t fancy giving him CPR.
I meant to mention that my wife used to paint there with a woman who lived in Naphill and was a fellow member of Bucks Art Society. She used to open up for Bucks Art Week.
That was 20+ years ago, though.
There are still several artists in Naphill who open for Bucks Art Week.
It might be easier to program in a discount, mark it as “Special Offer” ot something in the software.
There has to be more to this story, otherwise why not just set the tax at 1%, 0.1% or 0.01%? That would achieve 99% of the tax change with no re-engineering cost to business.
This will likely be the solution. Fix it at 1%.
The problem might well be that it is not programmed as a variable but that the rate of tax is coded on every line where it is used
If I was running a supermarket chain and required to drop the tax from 8% down to zero but couldn’t quite get to zero I would be concerned about both the government getting nasty about not following it’s regulations, and also a class action on behalf of consumers who were being charged tax that is both illegal and not being passed on to the governement.
Beat me to it, I must get up earlier.
Without knowing the details – plausible it can only be set as an integer percentage so the obvious “0.0000000001%” trick makes no difference. Or there may be rounding rules like always rounding tax up to the nearest currency unit so these tricks always deduct some irritating amount rather than the required zero.
Just change the number to 1% and the staff will be able to calculate a further 1% off in their heads. It’s Japan, for heaven’s sake, not Third World London.
The UK ‘smart’ meter roll out comes immediately to mind …
Because the Japanese sales tax is universal, I wouldn’t be surprised if some programmer had used zero as a ‘invalid/not set/null’ marker. I sympathise, the very first financial processing thing I did (a stock control back end), I though”VAT” *meant* fifteen, so it was hard coded in. Waddaya mean VAT could be a different amount, that’s like saying “fortnight” could be a different number of days.
Yeah, 15% VAT, that dates me.
Economists would generally prefer if VAT were a single rate and universal across all goods/services. Would cut down on a lot of those “is a Jaffa Cake a biscuit” rules and the cost of their enforcement. Would be politically toxic though even if going universal meant the headline rate would go down – food, children’s clothes etc.
VAT on yooni fees would make a pretty penny from overseas students. But the British students would riot.
But, it is Labour Party policy to charge VAT on payment for education, innit?
Sadly they did not pursue this argument to its logical conclusion. Even for “private” unis like Buckingham. (Though if they had specifically targeted such unis that would have been an even sillier outcome.)
Does Labour-run education actually add any value?
But the British students would riot.
[DEEP THOUGHT voice} Whom would that inconvenience?
Apparently the idea that the government would remove the tax was literally unthinkable to the software makers.
Do they have no exempt items? I suppose that making all items exempt would be a lot to change, and then change back. Or perhaps that makes the invoice “look wrong” and so is also unthinkable.
@jgh says it’s universal
It’s universal with two rates: 8% and 10%. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising optimiser coded that as a single bit.
I smell BS.
Most modern cash registers are basically computers and get updates and changes all the time. Someone can reprogram this for each cash register and roll it out within a week. Any tills that cannot be reprogrammed are clearly for the 1950s and should be replaced. There just can’t be that many of them and those will be in smaller places like one owner local shops.
Software was never designed for a 0% tax rate. Maybe so but that is why we still have armies of programmers to make changes to what was not originally designed.
Nope. Very believable. Japan is fantastic at hardware, but the mentality that gets you there is not the mentality that gets you good software. Hardware is about making something that does the job it was specified to do efficiently, accurately and repeatably.
Software is about noting the specified requirements, throwing them in the bin, working out what was *actually* wanted and providing that. I can easily believe that something in Japan could be hard-coded as that would be more efficient than having a variable to do the job, because the idea of changing something after it has been built just isn’t a thing.
Source: dealing with Japanese clients (IT). “Please provide a comprehensive list of all the possible ways your product can go wrong” is not an uncommon request.
And tbf Japan also uses a lot of old tech/hardware. It’s a recurring joke every time a newly appointed Japanese minister says this time we really will persuade businesses to get with the 21st century and give up on faxes. That announcement has been recycled for decades. Sometimes the traditional tech works, many of the staff and especially the managers tend to be old, and it’s a country surprisingly resistant to change. So the presence of ancient cash registers with a built-in tax rate and no software updates via the internet wouldn’t be surprising at all. Obviously there’ll be shops with modern fancy POS kit but I bet there’ll be many small and medium family businesses doing things in astonishingly antiquated ways too.
Even the UK government is somewhat constrained with what tricks it can pull off on budget day. They might bring in a new CGT rate on the day to stop people liquidating assets after the announcement but before it comes in. But in practice they would struggle to do stuff like cut the ISA contribution limit on the day, even though this scare stories about this get substantial press coverage, because banks would need a bit of time to implement this in their systems.
Yeah, Japanese software development is very much a last-thought throw-it-in, bash something together “why do we need these damn people?” process. Software developers are seen as on a similar gruding essential as the people who empty the bins.
How difficult can this be, though? The old cash registers used to do it with metal cogs.
I just checked on something. Those old cash machine were capable of rendering receipts with or without purchase tax added. Because not all things carried purchase tax.
From which we can deduce – mechanical engineers clever sods, software engineers, thick sods.
This master piece of mechanical engineering: Gross Cash Registers Ltd., founded by brothers Sam and Henry Gross. Their cash registers were particularly popular around the time of decimalisation in Britain in early 1971, Henry having designed one of the few known models of cash register which could switch currencies from £sd to £p so that retailers could easily change from one to the other on or after Decimal Day.
100%. Absolutely my experience, working there. Great at hardware; absolutely shit at software.
To caveat the “great at hardware”, I know of an instrument I worked on which revealed a bad bug in its production masked ROM just before shipping. Managers had to work all weekend replacing the ROMs with EPROMS, then sealing the boxes again. Which was
funnynice.I recall when VAT replaced Purchase Tax in 1973 (at the rate of 10%) and much computer programming was needed to support it (mostly in COBOL). Then in 1991 Lamont decided the rate should be 17½% – many programs were using a 99 field to hold the VAT rate and needed rewriting. I suppose we were just lucky he didn’t choose 16⅔%.
17.5%, FFS. What was he thinking? “Tell you what, I’ll bring in a VAT rate that no-one can calculate mentally.”
Find 10%, that’s easy.
Now halve it, that’s easy, gets 5%.
Just halve it again to get 2.5%.
Now all you need to do is add them up!
That’s the theory. In practice how many people actually jump through the mental hoops?
My point exactly.
That is exactly how we did it. It’s seems challenging now because most people these days aren’t accustomed to doing mental arithmetic. Before currency decimalisation it was obligatory. Everybody did it.
That was a long time ago. I recall more than one incident from about 30 years ago where, if you offered a £10 note and a 10p coin to pay for something that cost £9 10p, the cashier would say “You’ve given me too much “ and hand your 10p back, followed by 90p in loose change. All I wanted was a pound coin.
3/6 in the pound, if you’re still doing £sd currency.
True, but this was 20 years after decimalisation of the £.
“The impossible just takes a little longer.”
There is NFW they can’t change it to drop the tax, or change rate to zero. If so, they have bigger problems coming. Has all the software staff been fired and there is no support?
Real computer science hasn’t been tried.
Simply not believable.
Have you ever been to Japan? It’s entirely believable. This is nothing to do with competence (although they’re shit at software); simply that it was unthinkable – by anyone – that sales tax might ever be 0%.
So? You change the software. 5 minute job.
That’s the American way — 5 minutes to make the change and don’t bother doing any acceptance testing.
The British way would have been to already have the tax field as a signed 32-bit float when the software was built because the original programmer had met government idiocy before.
The Japanese way is to state that this was not in the original specification for when the software was written, therefore it cannot be done. If it ends up needing to be done, that will be an entirely new piece of software.
Could be.
I still believe someone along the line told them it couldn’t be done, and, being completely ignorant of computing, BELIEVED THEM. Hence, the story became, “It can’t be done,” and not, “We are dumbasses.”
We’re going to have fun here with Reeves’ summer holiday temporary VAT cut for ‘family days out’.
The VAT rate changes not infrequently here, it’ll be doable. There’ll be bigger problems with the definitions of “what is a children’s meal?”