The blank cell that was ours, not theirs
In our comparison table a dash means the rival’s own site does not say. Four of one rival’s dashes were wrong, in the direction easiest to miss.
Our comparison table has three states, and the rules are printed on the page. A tick means the company says it does this. A dash means their own site does not say. Half means it exists in a narrower form than the row describes. The rule behind the dash is that guessing a cross for a competitor is how a comparison becomes a lie, so a blank is meant to be the cautious choice: we are not saying they cannot, only that we did not find them saying they can.
On Friday four of one rival’s dashes turned out to be wrong. Their site does say. It says they have a kitchen display system, in the post announcing their funding. It says their terminals switch to offline processing when the connection drops and store ten thousand transactions each, in four separate case studies. It describes stock management in two case studies and voucher and promotion management on the home page. Four cells moved: a tick, a tick, a half and a half.
Why a wrong dash is worse than it looks
A dash feels safe because it makes no positive claim. But a reader comparing columns reads a dash as “they do not have this”, whatever the legend says, and so a dash on a feature a rival plainly describes is a false statement about them with the quietest possible wording. It is disparagement in the direction nobody checks, because the person who would complain is the rival, and the person who wrote it believes they were being careful.
The same fault had already been found once. In September the kitchen-screen cell for a different rival was a dash, and their site had a page on it. The sentence recording that correction sits in a test file so the reason is not lost. Friday was the second time the blank was ours, and the method that found both was the same: read the rival’s own pages, all of them, and print the sentence rather than count the matches.
What stayed blank, and why
One cell did not move. Another comparison site ticks that rival for self-order kiosks. The only mention on the rival’s own 83 pages is a 2020 article listing industry trends, which names kiosks as a trend and not as a product. That is not their site saying they do it, so the dash stays, whatever somebody else ticked. The rule cuts both ways: a dash is wrong when the site says and right when it does not, and the only way to know which is to read it.