Tweet
So, just because something reminded me of this, I thought I'd toss it out to the community and see if anyone else has ever thought about something like this. Ok, here goes.
In my time working, I've had the (questionable) pleasure of working for two very different, and competing, stores. My first true job was working for Hollywood Video, when they built and opened a new store in walking distance from where I lived at the time. Now, HV has a fairly easy to use system on their registers (at least they did when I worked there, could be different in other places). You would scan the bar codes on the movies and other things, they would show up on the screen, you hit total, and then go to the payment options screen, they pay, reciept prints, and the movie(s) are marked as checked out. Customer changes their mind on something? Just hit a single button, arrow keys to scroll up to the item, and hit delete. Only real drawback was that due to the size of the reciepts in the printers, each transaction was limited to 10 items, usually wasn't a problem though.
Then, a few years later, I found myself employed at their rival, a local Blockbuster Video. And let me tell you... those machines were ANCIENT. And the software that ran them was just as ancient. Where HV has a nice, colorful, easy to read screen, BBV used a plain blue screen with text command inputs, and F# hotkeys. Now, the real issue was in how the computers handled ringing up a sale. See, at BBV, the instant you scan something when you have a person's account pulled up on the screen, it marks that item as being sold to the customer! Which means that if someone changes their mind, it's not as simple as pushing 2-3 buttons and taking it off the order. You have to call a manager over to 'credit' the item off the account, which requires the supervisor to input their ID and password into the terminal. Why it was set up like this, I'll never know... because it meant on busy nights, when lots of customers were shopping for their weekend movies, the managers would be bouncing all over the place to void things people changed their minds on, or didn't have the money for, or <insert reason here>.
Anyone else ever dealt with a computer system that seemed set up in such an odd manner as this?
In my time working, I've had the (questionable) pleasure of working for two very different, and competing, stores. My first true job was working for Hollywood Video, when they built and opened a new store in walking distance from where I lived at the time. Now, HV has a fairly easy to use system on their registers (at least they did when I worked there, could be different in other places). You would scan the bar codes on the movies and other things, they would show up on the screen, you hit total, and then go to the payment options screen, they pay, reciept prints, and the movie(s) are marked as checked out. Customer changes their mind on something? Just hit a single button, arrow keys to scroll up to the item, and hit delete. Only real drawback was that due to the size of the reciepts in the printers, each transaction was limited to 10 items, usually wasn't a problem though.
Then, a few years later, I found myself employed at their rival, a local Blockbuster Video. And let me tell you... those machines were ANCIENT. And the software that ran them was just as ancient. Where HV has a nice, colorful, easy to read screen, BBV used a plain blue screen with text command inputs, and F# hotkeys. Now, the real issue was in how the computers handled ringing up a sale. See, at BBV, the instant you scan something when you have a person's account pulled up on the screen, it marks that item as being sold to the customer! Which means that if someone changes their mind, it's not as simple as pushing 2-3 buttons and taking it off the order. You have to call a manager over to 'credit' the item off the account, which requires the supervisor to input their ID and password into the terminal. Why it was set up like this, I'll never know... because it meant on busy nights, when lots of customers were shopping for their weekend movies, the managers would be bouncing all over the place to void things people changed their minds on, or didn't have the money for, or <insert reason here>.
Anyone else ever dealt with a computer system that seemed set up in such an odd manner as this?
Comment