474
This old food court stand at the mall had digital menus, but used stickers when the prices changed.
(fedia.io)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
474 points (99.6% liked)
Mildly Interesting
17855 readers
4 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wonder if burn in was a factor? Or if the prospect of changing the images was out of the owners wheel house?
You know how it is; Brian was the guy who knew the password for the computer system, and he quit two years ago because the day manager wouldn't stop fucking with his schedule.
Brian knew the Old Ways. Without Brian, we are lost.
So, side story. Management at my old company wanted a dick-wagging screen in the office lobby. Literally just a graphic with the company logo and impressive sales numbers. Problem: they didn't want some random box having access to actual data. Fair. So the workaround was a static program that literally started from X and incremented by whatever values. And once or twice a year someone had to dig the airgapped PC out of a network closet and replace the exe via flash drive if the imaginary numbers got too incredulous. Brain dead simple procedure, well documented... and people still fucked it up.
By the time I left that TV was just playing fox business all day.
If they're a publicly traded company then they're lucky no one knowledgeable ever noticed that sign, because iirc lying about sales numbers is a no-no that can get you in trouble and bring big fines
Now that you mention it, that display might have gone away right around the same time the company went public. Good call.
Or maybe they were marking up the official prices set by the franchise’s software, and pocketing the difference.
Maybe? If it’s a franchise. But that is still solid B territory. Changing the files would be much less obvious
Wouldn’t that get caught by the accountants when the receipts don’t match up?
Maybe they were laundering the money? (nobody really knows what that means but it's always a viable explanation)
I just looked it up in the dictionary. It means "to conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary"
If this was independently owned, what likely happened is that the owner hired a company to do this, then lost the documentation of how to change it or just forgot how to do it. When it came time to change prices, they didn't know what to do, so they just taped prices on.
Yea, but i also notice that these type of screens display the same image day and night for years, and it’s a bad look for the burnt in lower price to shadow the new one, and at that point stickers or replacing the whole tv is the only fix