Obviously this is about the power outage in Spain.
While normally, if a card declines, people would probably have to leave their IDs with the restaurant while they went to get a withdrawl from their bank; this is a power outage, withdrawls wouldn’t work. It would be silly to arrest people because of a power outage. So I’m assuming people just have to give the restaurant owner/management their identity info with a promise to pay?
And power outages shouldn’t affect buses, since they run on gasoline/diesel, but the payment system processing transit passes might not work. Do buses still get run during a power outage and they just let people on for free, or do they just shut down the bus lines?
Anywhere that there is a massive power/internet outage for whatever reason (natural disaster, trunk cut by some idiot, technical failure) most businesses will put sales on hold or switch over to cash only and maybe take checks or write down credit card manual receipts to take care of later. Nobody is going to be prosecuted for the power going out during a meal and a restaurant and being unable to use their card for example. A grocery store will most likely take down information from anyone who was in the middle of shopping and square it up later, but keep new people from coming in to keep from being overwhelmed with too much manual tracking.
For restaurants, they will most likely choose not to charge anyone who had not paid yet for consistency so people with cash don’t feel like they were punished for having cash on hand. If the business knows the outage will last very long, they might offer free food if it is going to spoil anyway as a gesture of goodwill, especially for any regulars that were just hanging around to wait for the power to come back before they headed out.
Some tech based stuff that relies on processing payments might choose different approaches depending on the circumstances. Riders with cards that can’t be processed will most likely be allowed to just ride for free if the buses continue to run.