2015-10-14
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Retailing with your fellow-students
New Trends in Retail Point-of-Sale Systems
A far cry from their mechanical ancestors, new point-of-sale (POS) systems are helping businesses to cut
costs in everything from advertising to labor. Consumers are being directly marketed to using ever-evolving
algorithms, which are boosting impulse buys. One employee can easily manage a dozen new, retail POS
systems. These and other new trends in POS technology can modernize any business.
BusinessWeek.com reported recently that more Americans shop at a Wal-Mart store in one week (140
million) than annually watch the Super Bowl (80 million) or weekly view American Idol (23 million). What does
this have to do with retail point-of-sale (POS) systems? The answer is, in a word: everything.
Ubiquitous in large retail stores, supermarkets, fast-food chains, and white-cloth restaurants, point-of-sale
systems continue to improve the consumer shopping experience by speeding up transaction time while
delivering detailed and accurate receipts, which facilitate returns when necessary.
Since their introduction in the mid-1980s, businesses have benefited from retail POS systems through
increased customer satisfaction, better inventory management, and reduced shrinkage. New developments
are taking retail POS systems to a whole new level, however, helping to reduce labor costs and increase
impulse purchases, both in stores and on-line. Hereʼs how:
Self-Service Equals Labor Savings
Recently, supermarkets and home improvement stores have introduced self-serve retail POS systems.
Although an attendant cashier is needed to help when items are missing their bar codes or RFID (Radio
Frequency IDentification, радиочастотная идентификация) tags, when age verification is required, or
when shoppers are flummoxed, the public is adopting the concept. The necessary expertise to operate the
touch screens, scanners, and payment acceptance mechanisms is also growing. This means that one
attendant can be assigned a dozen or more retail POS system stations.
Although there are still far fewer self-serve retail POS systems than those operated by cashiers, a Europeanbased
food market chain opened retail locations in the U.S. this year that offer only self-service retail POS
systems, an indication of the belief in consumer acceptance and savvy.
