How Many Ways Can a Terminal Say No?

A Taxonomy of Declined-Transaction Wording Across Supermarket Self-Checkouts, Strip-Mall EFTPOS Terminals, and Food-Truck Card Readers

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement builds a nine-category taxonomy of declined-transaction wording from 1,142 transcribed prompts across supermarket self-checkouts, strip-mall EFTPOS terminals, and food-truck card readers, and finds a category's folk-rated severity predicts whether a shopper retries far better than the transaction's own logged decline cause. The Office of the Vice-Chancellor has since directed every University service point to adopt the taxonomy's gentlest category as its own denial-notice standard.

@misc{slop_ej9vbl,
  author       = {Bram Ntuli and Torun Ezeigwe and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {How Many Ways Can a Terminal Say No?: A Taxonomy of Declined-Transaction Wording Across Supermarket Self-Checkouts, Strip-Mall EFTPOS Terminals, and Food-Truck Card Readers},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ej9vbl},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-declined-transaction-wording-sorts-ej9vbl/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}