On Black Friday last year, Barclays recorded card transactions 62% above its average day for 2025. Nationwide customers made a record 11.9 million transactions, at one point reaching 185 every second. For retailers, millions of those purchases depended on the payment infrastructure in stores: terminals on counters, handhelds on shop floors and kiosks by entrances.Retailers plan stock, staffing and promotions months ahead of peak. The payments estate usually gets far less scrutiny, on the reasonable assumption that devices working in September will still be working in November…and most will. The trouble is that peak trading has a way of finding the weak points that were already there. That might be a terminal that occasionally drops its connection, a device running outdated software, or a spare that has sat in a drawer since 2023. Any of these is a minor irritation on an ordinary Tuesday. On the last Saturday before Christmas, with a queue to the door, it becomes a lost sale.What an outage really costsResearch published in April by FreedomPay and Retail Economics estimated that payment failures put up to £1.7bn in UK retail and hospitality sales at risk each year. Businesses reported just over five major disruptions a year on average and 72% of them fell during peak trading windows. The average outage lasted 79 minutes, yet only 40% of businesses surveyed could take card payments offline. Very few shoppers will wait anywhere near that long. The same study found frustration typically sets in after around seven minutes.Consumers are spending carefully this year and retailers will fight for every basket through pricing, promotions and marketing. Losing one of those sales at the final step is among the most avoidable losses of all.Less slack in the systemStores are also running with fewer people. UK retail employment fell to 2.75 million jobs in June, and the four-quarter average has dropped to its lowest level on record, according to the BRC. With employment costs still rising, simply adding more staff for peak is becoming a more expensive answer.That changes what happens when a device fails. A member of staff used to be on hand to reboot it, fetch a replacement or ring the helpdesk while someone else kept the line moving. In a leaner store, that person is often busy elsewhere. Self-checkouts, kiosks and other unattended points of sale also have to keep serving customers without anyone permanently beside them. For grocers handling heavier Christmas baskets and higher footfall, one lane going down at the wrong moment can back up the entire store.Five questions to ask nowNone of this calls for alarm. It calls for an honest look at the estate while there is still time to act on what it shows. Five questions cover most of the ground.How is every device performing today? Not how many terminals you own, but which are online, which fail most often and what software each one is running.Where are your oldest devices? If they sit in your busiest stores, that's where any weakness could become most costly.How much can you fix without a site visit? Pushing an update or reconfiguring devices overnight across hundreds of stores is very different from waiting for an engineer in mid-December.Can you add checkout capacity quickly? Mobile terminals and SoftPOS on a standard smartphone can ease pressure at the tills, support concessions and serve pop-up trading without permanent hardware. Standards such as PCI MPoC have also strengthened the security framework around mobile acceptance, making SoftPOS a practical option for mainstream retail.What happens when the network drops? Offline processing and failover connectivity are dull subjects right up until the moment they save a trading day.Decided before the doors openMuch of the outcome of peak is settled before the first Black Friday queue forms. In our experience, readiness has less to do with having the newest kit than with knowing what you have, where it sits, how it is performing and how quickly you can respond when something slips.That preparation is unglamorous: audits, updates, spares in the right places and support plans agreed in advance. With Black Friday weeks away, there is time to get it done. No#BlackFridayJean-Philippe NiedergangActing Group CEO / EMEA-PACIFIC-LATAM CEOCastles Technology07 Oct, 2026