This store has two sales stations although one doubles as the management station. Each sales station has a narrow receipt printer and a cash drawer. A third, standard paper size printer does orders, reports and tags. A network connects the two computers.
This is the way (catalog import) all stores will get on-line in the future. Ann, the owner, sells Carlton (American Greeting Cards). Rather than spending hundreds of hours typing inventory data, she contacted Carlton and got their entire catalog on disks. She ran the import routine and had the entire inventory of 7,000 items on-line in about 20 minutes! She can pick any card in her store, scan it, and pop up the description, price, and cost. Furthermore, the sale is recorded in the right department. (If you don't know if your major suppliers have their inventory on disks, just call them and ask. It's becoming the rule.)
Carlton sends Ann disks about twice a year with new products and prices. The price update routine keeps all the prices correct and prints a report of price changes and new items.
Ann prints the bar code labels for the collectible items since small craft suppliers still don't put bar codes on their products.
Ann says the system makes it much easier to train a new clerk. She has several clerks who work the sales counter. They place the scanner over the face down card, push the button, and read the total from the screen. The clerks only have to select the right type of payment and be able to make change.
The end of shift cash drawer reconciliation shows how much should be in the drawer for deposit in cash, checks, credit cards, and gift certificates.
After two years, Ann says, "If I didn't have that machine in there, I'd have to have another employee. We can do our inventory and do our orders easy. The hardest part was getting all the inventory in the machine. We're up to 12,000 items, now. We just added it in as we had time. Now, we don't put anything out for sale until it has been entered."
She continues, "A man called me and said he was nervous about computers. I told him nobody ever heard of computers when I was in school. We thought that was for the space program. I told him, 'if I can learn it, anybody can'."