Anyone work in a store with a portable register?
We have one we use for special events. Around Valentine's Day, we'll set up a flower shop in front of the store and wheel the portable register in there. During other holidays, we'll set up grills in front of the store (we have a dining patio just outside of one of our doors) along with the register. We're using it for the holiday weekend. We used to grill outside every weekend until the city told us in a not so kind way "Hey you have to pull a permit every time you grill, and oh BTW you can only get 6 permits a year". One permit can cover an entire weekend, but still...
The "portable" is an entire regular checkstand.. scale, normal register, credit card reader, printer.. everything. Except it has a wireless network card in it. It's on a wooden cart with a couple of ... what can be best described as car batteries, hooked up to a charger/inverter to power the whole thing.
It also REALLY sucks to move. It's a super heavy cart on 6 wheels, probably pushing 400 pounds or so. Since it's on 6 wheels instead of 4, it goes whatever damned direction it wants. 1 person can't even think about moving it, 2 people might be able to if they're real careful. Realistically it takes 3 people.
My main gripe about using it is... once it's outside the doors it has almost no range whatsoever (thanks to some chucklefuck who broke the antenna on it). And the inverter gives NO warning when the battery is about to die. No beep, nothing, it just shuts everything off, and only then does it let out an ear splitting screech (and it won't shut up until it's been plugged in for awhile). And plugging it back in won't bring it back to life, it has to charge for several hours before it'll allow the register to power back up. ESPECIALLY annoying because there's no "emergency" release on the drawers we use (and even if there was, if a register isn't shut down properly, the last logged in cashier shows up as logged in and our registers won't let them log in to another register until... they're signed off from the original one). So we do everything we can to keep it plugged in. And I should mention our register systems track drawers by cashier number, one cashier per till period. So whoever's unlucky enough to be on it when it dies can't sign in to another register until the mobile cart can power back up and connect to the network. We do have a way to force a cashier off of a register, but if it died immediately after a transaction and before the transaction info could go to the server, their drawer will be way off.
We have one we use for special events. Around Valentine's Day, we'll set up a flower shop in front of the store and wheel the portable register in there. During other holidays, we'll set up grills in front of the store (we have a dining patio just outside of one of our doors) along with the register. We're using it for the holiday weekend. We used to grill outside every weekend until the city told us in a not so kind way "Hey you have to pull a permit every time you grill, and oh BTW you can only get 6 permits a year". One permit can cover an entire weekend, but still...
The "portable" is an entire regular checkstand.. scale, normal register, credit card reader, printer.. everything. Except it has a wireless network card in it. It's on a wooden cart with a couple of ... what can be best described as car batteries, hooked up to a charger/inverter to power the whole thing.
It also REALLY sucks to move. It's a super heavy cart on 6 wheels, probably pushing 400 pounds or so. Since it's on 6 wheels instead of 4, it goes whatever damned direction it wants. 1 person can't even think about moving it, 2 people might be able to if they're real careful. Realistically it takes 3 people.
My main gripe about using it is... once it's outside the doors it has almost no range whatsoever (thanks to some chucklefuck who broke the antenna on it). And the inverter gives NO warning when the battery is about to die. No beep, nothing, it just shuts everything off, and only then does it let out an ear splitting screech (and it won't shut up until it's been plugged in for awhile). And plugging it back in won't bring it back to life, it has to charge for several hours before it'll allow the register to power back up. ESPECIALLY annoying because there's no "emergency" release on the drawers we use (and even if there was, if a register isn't shut down properly, the last logged in cashier shows up as logged in and our registers won't let them log in to another register until... they're signed off from the original one). So we do everything we can to keep it plugged in. And I should mention our register systems track drawers by cashier number, one cashier per till period. So whoever's unlucky enough to be on it when it dies can't sign in to another register until the mobile cart can power back up and connect to the network. We do have a way to force a cashier off of a register, but if it died immediately after a transaction and before the transaction info could go to the server, their drawer will be way off.
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