Retail: What kind of register platform does your store use? (minor rant about techs)

[bean]

Anything from a cheap register from Sam's Club to the massive 50+ register systems you see in WalMart powered by IBM. What does your store use?

We use a pretty obscure system from NCR... NCR is a major player in convenience stores and food service, you hardly ever see their actual registers in a large setting (but most scanner/scale combos I see used are from NCR). It's NCR's ACS (advanced checkout solution), running on NCR RealPOS hardware. It's a really, really easy system to use (entirely menu driven), but it can be sluggish at times. And when a register crashes, you get the lovely Windows blue screen of death on both the cashier and customer displays. Thankfully when they crash, 99% of the time it's while they're idle or right after finishing a transaction.

We have 20 registers in my store - 12 regular checkstands, 4 express, customer service, coffee bar, smokehouse, and a portable one that runs via wireless.

I've never, ever seen NCR's ACS software anywhere except my employer, nor have I ever seen much beyond their scanners in major retail settings.

Also, NCR's service "techs" that they send out are jackasses... 5 visits to replace a broken cash drawer recently, 4 to replace a crashed HD (they replaced everything, including the motherboard, in the machine... except for the HD). The other day they were out to replace a broken scanner/scale. Instead of actually repairing/replacing the broken one, the jackass swapped it with one from a register we don't use every day, and didn't even bother hooking up the "broken" one to make the power light come on. My boss and I are both fuming about it and we're going to take turns cussing him out next time he's out. We do use this register during the holidays, but not much any other time of year. So instead of waiting for them to play find their own balls again, we're probably going to just swap the scanner out ourselves with the one from the portable register (which we only use a few times a year) so we can get it running for the holidays.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Dunno, but it's a pretty crappy one if it goes tits up in the middle of a big sale and won't process checks and debit cards, and processes credit cards only up to $50.

Why yes, this did happen over the weekend. Why do you ask?

Whatever happened better be fixed by Black Friday, or else . I guess they managed to get it working again after a couple hours. It's a good thing we didn't need the company tech to come out, since she lives in Stevens Point which is at least a couple hours away.

[Victory Sabre]

In the gas station we use the Ruby system.
At the restaurant we use a Sharp ER-3100.

[Rine]

I don't know much about our registers we have about...50 registers scattered throughout the store. They are IBM machines. They like to freeze if you scan too quickly.

[Android Kaeli]

I don't know what it is our registers run on or what they are exactly (other then registers), but they've been in use for almost a decade and are slow as anything. With the way that the registers are set up (eight registers at front, the two fastest are at customer service, but all are two to a register bay), if one register goes down, it's twin goes slower and must be shut down as well when the other is getting fixed.

Customers complain when it takes a minute and a half for their receipt to print. Been trying to convince boss-man to keep pestering corporate in getting us some new registers but he said, and I'm quoting exactly what he said, "We'll get new registers from corporate when hell freezes over, that's how cheap they are". Sad isn't when the SM says that about the head honchos?

[bean]

In the gas station we use the Ruby system. .

Verifone Ruby? Not a bad system at all, just a bit dated by now. I used to do tech support for a lot of Verifone product in the late 90s, the Ruby had come out recently and was the most complex product we supported in my call center.

Every Racetrac store I've been in, even brand new ones, uses the Ruby. It's very powerful for its time, and still leaps ahead of a lot of today's low end and mid line gas station systems. It'll interface to pretty much any pump made in the past 25 years too, and it's still supported by Verifone. Even the tiny mom and pop store in the middle of nowhere (right by my apartment) uses the Ruby, and until a few months ago, they had pumps from the mid 80s
(they failed their last inspection, so the owner got some used early-mid 90s pumps with card readers). Oddly, they use a stand alone credit card terminal for most stuff even though the Ruby has all of that stuff built in.

[Bella_Vixen]

The good old Ruby system. Those were the days.




{Some days I wonder if I miss the gas station business. Then I remember hearing about a LOT of armed robberies at local gas stations this time last year. }

[mattm04]

We use some way outdated hardware running (i beleive)some sort of custom POS software that has been been modifed over and over and over and over from what looks like 15 years ago on OS/2.

We use the keyboard instead of touch screen, and not half of them don't work right. Yes we DO need to use the Cash Tender key at the END of the transaction without a manger override as they recently did for some reason. That was not fun.

[SuperDan]

Former job in grocery used a program called Microsoft Retail, running on the small desktop Dell computers using WinXP. The program also had a counterpart in the scanning office. Registers had scale/scanners from NCR and a regular register keyboard, but there was a full keyboard and mouse in the drawer below that would help with certain functions (or access solitaire when the store was slow and management wasn't looking).

Current job uses Micros systems with a touch screen.