Friday, April 5, 2019

20th Anniversary in the POS Industry

So, after spending several years in retail and restaurant management, I moved to Idaho and joined a little cash register company called RVP Business Systems in April 1999.

From the days of working from a hallway to a bathroom furiously making sets of QuickSell 2000 demo disks (not CD's - actual 3.5" floppies - high density even!) to the cloud based solutions of today, a lot has changed.

But a lot hasn't changed:
  • Successful retailers know their customers and their products 
  • Successful retailers know how to use technology without having technology use them
  • Successful retailers see technology as an investment and expect a return on their investment
  • Successful point of sale dealers, partners, VAR's and resellers know retail & know how to help customers increase revenue and reduce labor costs to compete 
  • A high percentage of retailers still place a high value on face to face conversations (thus why I travel 110+ days each year)
  • The credit card companies are always looking for ways to raise rates and come up with new requirements to sell more hardware
  • POS companies come and go no matter how big or how small they are
  • The price for QuickSell 2000 was around $999 when it first came out - the price for Microsoft RMS held steady at $1190 throughout the years - not bad when factoring for inflation.
  • A complete POS system for a small retailer in 1999 sold for $2995 plus shipping. In 2019, you can get a complete POS system for around $5000. Again, not bad when factoring for inflation.
  • The Epson TMT88 is still an awesome receipt printer
  • I still can't stand merchant services companies/credit card processors due to how many times they interrupted my day when I worked in retail and restaurant management. However, I have found some good eggs out there like Gravity Payments and certain reps at TSYS, First Data, and Heartland. The bad eggs keep changing their names (or merging) but not their reputation (I'm talking about you WorldPay and Cayan!)
What will the next 20 years bring?  Pass along comments and questions to me at kevinantosh@gmail.com or 208-340-5632.

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