The selling points of
BY BRENDA G. RUSSELL
point of sale
A good point of sale system is a vital component of
customer service. Photo courtesy of Coff ee Shop Manager
H
anging chads have faded into presidential lore, and this year they fi nally might be swept away in one holdout
precinct: the coff ee shop. Owners are voting for a change from the "buy 10 get 1 free"
loyalty card. Th ey're ready to move past nominating a mayor on Foursquare and electing to install new point-of-sale platforms that off er a full ballot of benefi ts, from prepaid cards and loyalty incentives to inventory controls and revenue reports. Stored-value cards are entering their second decade in
coff ee shops, and chain operators continue to adopt them, most recently at the red drive-through kiosks of Seattle's Baristas Coff ee Co. (baristas.tv). Cards off er a secure method to speed transactions and dispense loyalty points widely and automatically. "You can reduce credit card swipe fees by selling prepaid
cards," said Lee Alexander, vice president of sales and marketing for POS Core Technologies in Redmond, Wash., developer of the Coff ee Shop Manager soſt ware program (coff eeshopmanager. com). "If a card is loaded weekly instead of a card being run daily," Alexander says, "this can save a shop over $30 per year per customer." An up-to-date POS system off ers more obvious revenue and inventory advantages to coff ee operators. "Price mistakes are
20 | February 2012 • www.specialty-coffee.com
virtually eliminated," says Mike Spence, vice president of POS developer SelbySoſt Inc. in Puyallup, Wash. "Th e POS controls pricing and allows the employee to focus on the customer and the product‚ not the register. Price mistakes can account for 0.5 to 1 percent of your gross sales a year."
MORE THAN A CASHBOX A fl exible POS system provides "more than a cash box and
a calculator," says Jeff Lichtman, director of sales and customer development at Own Point of Sale Corp. with offi ces in San Francisco and Detroit. It tracks customer habits so that counter staff can drive incremental sales. "If a company is planning on growing, it needs to plan to
evolve its capabilities for tracking data and managing multiple locations, staff teams, and demographics," Lichtman says. A POS also can deal coff ee bars in on the fast-growing business
of giſt cards, generating holiday stocking-stuff er revenue and off ering a fraud-resistant upgrade on giſt certifi cates. Cards can be marketed to nearby employers, drawing giſt recipients as new customers. Prepaid cards also keep current customers returning rather
than sampling competitors. Alexander suggests using stored- value and loyalty-cards to cross-sell whole beans.
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