Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Video: Retail Hardware (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-26 23:39:46
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Okay! Yes! I'm still alive! It's been complicated but I'm still over here doing things! In fact, I did this! I have no idea if I will do more videos in this series, but the probability is high since I came up with such a good series title, that kind of obligates me to do more. And I guess at a minimum I gotta come through on the Wayne, I already wrote like 12,000 words about that thing before I realized it needed to be a separate video and just cut off the front half and turned it into this one. Hope you enjoy! Thanks!

Files

POS Hardware RC2

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cathoderaydude Tip me: https://ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude

Comments

Shanix

First frame of the video and I _know_ it's gonna be a good one.

Xyon

You ARE alive, and you're Doing The Thing, yay! Edit: wait, you cut the front off? Is that typical?

Liam Romano

Sys admin at a largish retail business here and you know I've put some thought into trying to take a late 90s IBM cash register keyboard and make it work on a modern PC. It will always be hard to resist that trash.

cathoderaydude

If you have any of the early '90s IBM stuff around, get in touch lol. I'd like to get some 4690 gear, and I'd really like to get some 4680 stuff but almost all of its lost to the landfill

ssJaken

This is absolutely relevant to my odd unique interests. Thank you

Liam Romano

Let me ask some folks and take some pics but I might be able to help here.

Algoinde

When you picked up the Toshiba, I wanted the "Little Guys" graphic to pop in for a split second so bad :)

Chas Becht

Ironically since the only thing you are sure of is that everyone loves thermal printers, I hate thermal printers. Love everything else about this though. I'm thinking I may have seen those powered USB connectors inside an ATM recently, so this was really fascinating.

Retro Rabbit Hole

Always great when you post! Take care of yourself!

Redqueenrunning

We're doing a refresh of POS stuff for a major chain, and man, these are still just as bad as the NCRs we supported for Sears years ago. Fav feature so far: weird plug that we thought was adapted usb was in fact just the tx and rx pairs of a 10mb eth chip. Since there's no law against running 12v between the pairs.

cathoderaydude

aaaaaAAAHH lmao. also hey probably goes without saying but if you got any gear that got lost on its way to the dumpster feel free to shoot me a message, I might be interested :D

Turaiel Rylis

I thought this was a really interesting one! I took an interest in POS systems as a kid but never really got to mess with them, so it's great to finally get some insight into how they worked. I remember PCWorld or MaximumPC or whatever always had ads for them in the back and I wanted one so bad!

Algoinde

Thermal printers are the cutest things. Especially that bluetooth one I bought to fudge some lost or ineligible paper receipts for the work trip spendings reports. When that was over I left it exposed on Google Cloud Printers for friends to send me random funnies whenever they pleased. Woke up one day to 12 meters of Long Cat.

vivi_

I feel so seen

Brian Clark

When I was a bartender we used iPads on dedicated WiFi networks and POS Lavu. Everything was administered from a central server that management would connect to with a web app. Our business was a bit unique in that we had both a restaurant and banquet/conference center all connected to one system with an array of menu items. Just as you described, the cash drawers would connect to Epson receipt printers with a RJ-11 cable. There were times when we would have to setup remote stations during certain events which required us to have an ethernet drop to the printer, with a power supply and the drawer. There were times we had to come up with creative solutions to get ethernet to outdoor areas such as Ethernet over powerline, and MoCa. Definitely would be interested in this as a series.

Shawn Anderson

As someone who used to work for Aloha POS installing systems in restaurants and truck stops, I found this to be both fascinating and nostalgic. Thank you.

Classic Gaming Country

@5:50 your "register" pronunciation story was amazing. I've been hearing you say it with a hard g for years in silence, wondering why you pronounced it that way (not that it matters, but when a audial anomaly hits my hears, I can't help but lock in on it. 😅 @7:05, a DVD copy of CHiPs would have been amazing right here.. 🤣 @40:53 "PD" here I assume refers to USB Power Delivery. That may need to be expanded on, or a little popup showing its logo or a quick description. @54:39 I both love and hate thermal printers, specifically label printers.. but I have loved them enough to learn Zebra's ZPL language for creating my own labels, so there's that.. 😂

Loading_M_

I've been thinking about your point about the things nerds like: as you said, we don't want to do the job, but we do want to do some subset of the job, without having to deal with any of the bs from an actual job. Also though, I'd be willing to bet that most cahiers don't know much (if anything) about the connectors, the pc, or the peripherals, beyond the bare minimum to use them. As nerds, we like to learn how they work, and how they solve problems we didn't even know existed.

Justin Danielson

As someone who would love to take his own deep dive into POS systems but lives with people who would really prefer I had fewer weird computers around, I would love many more videos on these!

IrisRealtime

I worked at 711 in Japan and what was most interesting to me when the payment options show up for the customer (cash, card, barcode, about a billion other japanese payment methods) the same interface shows up on your screen too. I assume it's there so that if a grandma can't read well or a foreigner can't read at all you can tap the option for them.

IrisRealtime

Also, touchscreens on those were capacitive, which means every employee would tap with their barcode scanner instead of their fingers

IrisRealtime

ALSO, I made one of the machines freeze once. I thought I broke it myself, but actually they were so old that dust bunnies formed on the inside so they had to order a technician to blow all of it out and then it worked just fine

Dom M

Another banger CRD video. I have definitely gone down the receipt printer / barcode scanner rabbit hole and come up empty before. They just *seem* like they should be so useful

Alfred Klek

I am one of those 100 people. I recognized it by it's power switch. I used that same Dresser Wayne POS for several years when I worked at a Chevron station in Alaska in the late aughts. I'm not sure what kind of information you're looking for, but ask away and I'll do my my best to answer. By the way, that Chevron station has been closed and it's now a weed store and that's very funny. (edit) I really enjoyed this video :).

epic__beard

I didn't expect POS systems to be so interesting. Never underestimate CRD. This was another great video!

KazTastic222

I left retail so long ago (supermarkets - I worked for Coles for 5 years, and Aldi for 6 weeks), but the highlight of my time there was when I figured out how to get into the NT4 Explorer so I could calibrate the screens myself. They finally updated to XP in like 2010. As for reading out POS as a word, it's probably familiar to most Australians and Kiwis because our main card payment system is called EFTPOS, which has always been pronounced as a word. We used to sell the back of our receipt paper for ad space. The middleman was called Shop-a-docket, which eventually became the word for any coupon printed on a receipt. We call receipts dockets for some reason. With that being said, my time in the postal service finally made me realise how bad Windows CE truly was.

Mat Fordon

THIS is what we're paying you for! Keep going weirder!

Henry J

Can totally relate to the "reGister" thing. When I was a kid, for some reason I adopted the cursive form of lowercase A as my default when writing. I think it was because print and cursive were still being taught at the same time. Nobody bothered to correct my weird 'a' for like, 10 years.

Will G.

My first job was at a supermarket in the late 90s and one day I was in the back and found out all the registers ran off a large washing machine sized minicomputer with a couple 8 inch floppies. You will not be surprised to learn that chain did not make it out of the 00s without a couple bankruptcies.

Will G.

I once tried writing a basic POS system for a college course and boy did I underestimate the scale of the problem by a factor of at least a 100. Dealing with taxes for different categories of groceries and partial refunds is a nightmare before you realize you're building a tremendously complicated financial accounting system.

Pietro Gagliardi

I once got so fed up with the obtuse and overcomplicated world of restaurant POS systems at my father's restaurant that I started writing my own that was meant to be simple; it never got past a half-working UI proof of concept that I kept rewriting (if you really want to see it it's github andlabs/simplesale). And now I'm considering reviving that under the name "FurryPOS"; thanks =P (Also that default thumbnail is the new ALIENS meme.)

skyhawk

Home Depot stores in Canada use bog-standard All-in-One PCs, combined with a powered Powered USB hub for connecting to retail hardware.

Xaviette Katzenfrau

I worked for about 6 months at a QuikTrip which I believe uses Gilbarco pumps and - I never considered it really - probably a customized version of their own POS software. The machines were super locked down, appeared to run some form of Windows 10 based on the boot animation but would immediately swing into the custom screen-filling POS software, you could preload money on the pumps from the screen by tapping along the row of gas pumps, it would also tell you anytime someone was currently using one, so like if someone said they wanted $20 on pump 15 but I see that pump 15 is currently running, I can ask the customer to verify which pump they're at. It was also incredibly baroque in how it handled transactions, like it did NOT handle refunds, all of those had to be processed by someone off-site, and being QuikTrip, it did NOT tell you how much change was owed, as cashiers were expected to learn to count up change on their own. To QT's credit, the training worksheets have you figure it out very quickly and it is probably more accurate + faster to have the cashier's just Understand how to count change. At other jobs I've worked since then, my coworkers get SPOOKED at how quickly I can count out change and will stop me from handing it to the customer to make sure I got it right, because they're used to reading a number and slowly picking through the drawer to find the right amount.

Jordan Chase

I've been working professionally in point of sale systems since 2011, so this video was *exactly* up my alley. I even learned a few things. All the hardware I interact with just uses USB, not powered USB so I've never seen or had to support that myself. I've seen those ports but never knew quite what they were because they weren't ever relevant. I'll be around for whatever future videos come out on this topic.

Jordan Chase

Very true! And that's before you get into all the intricate special use case of each industry too.

sdomi

was a great watch! i wasn't at all interested in the topic an hour ago, but boy i sure am now

doink

I was a clerk trainer and later a 2A at QT for 6 years. You got it exactly right, change was done by hand. We all believed it was faster, and had tricks to git gud. I would teach people how to count change. The POS software was completely written in house, they had their own dev team. There was a lot of custom software they wrote for themselves. There were two PCs that were used for reviewing security footage and inventory management. They connected to the POS’s to sync between shifts to do cash audits. We used Windows Phone based handhelds for predictive inventory ordering, it was very novel at the time.

doink

QT was and probably still is extremely particular about their operations. They don’t like “off the shelf” stuff. They always make stuff in house for themselves. It can sometimes be over engineered shit, or a competitive advantage.

Chris Jeter

Well that was a completely fascinating deep dive! 500 years from now when Data Archeologists are studying the tech of the past, CRD videos will be the most cited primary source by a very wide margin.

Matt Whitehorn

I'd absolutely take an energy drink tier list video presented from the perspective of the cashier judging you... Was a fascinating video as a former retail worker, I'd be glued to more, especially to see more of a glimpse of those forbidden backend systems.

GRDC

RE: your question about interest in this stuff: I think you covering POS systems as a topic was interesting and some of this connection stuff... but outside of that I find this stuff as dull as dishwater.

ChiraFox

This video is great! And working on POS systems is my day job. I still find them fascinating :)

Xaviette Katzenfrau

Ha! I was about to comment that I have a Latitude XT convertible that uses that plug and then you immediately brought it up. My poorly recalled research would suggest that the port Dell used was invented for the XT to make it as small as possible by eliminating the optical drive at a time where that was still an unforgivable sin.

Nick Kourpias

I found the video and topic really interesting and I definitely would like to see more videos about POS systems.

Mark Stradling

well, I didn’t know i was interested in that until I watched that. Of course, it’ll probably bug me that you unlikely to do chip & pin, given America didn’t get it until, like, now, but more of this…

cathoderaydude

We've had chip cards for over a decade, they're pretty universal, though we aren't using PINs except for debit which I think is the distinction.

D. Roscoe

Yeah, it might have taken longer to roll it out here than elsewhere in the world, but chip cards and contactless are pretty much the only way I've seen anyone pay without cash for a long while now. Swiping is only ever done as a fallback if the chip reader fails, I've only done that maybe twice in the past five years, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone else do it, let alone the last time I saw a card that didn't have a chip at all. Every bank and credit union issues them out now, both for debit and credit cards.

Thermo [D G]

I know it's just a bit, and I know it absolutely, does not matter in the slightest, but bananas are never sold by count. Yes, technically, you can set it up to do, whatever you want. However, since bananas can vary in size *wildly*, they are always sold by weight.

cathoderaydude

So apparently they are at *target.* They have a special PLU for bananas by qty, 8011 - but I didn't know that at the time :p

cathoderaydude

Oh and wait a sec - I got these at a gas station with no scale. Surely they sold them by qty.

Thermo [D G]

Target will drive me bananas

Thermo [D G]

Oh weird. I suppose they'd have to get it from a supplier who goes by ct which is definitely not standard. Also, again, just the bit, but the bit does not include looking at a barcode that is so incredibly small its impossible for the scanner to read so you have to punch in the # manually

DeScruff

That SDL connector on the Toshiba. Isn't that the same connector that Model M keyboards use? (At least the ones with removable cables). If Toshiba is still using it, I guess that explains how people are able to source the connector for brand new USB cables.

Thermo [D G]

Aw, you called me superhuman Nope, I make tons of mistakes, and my employer doesn't trust me enough to void out items over $2.50 Most of it is muscle memory though. Like, I'm sure the testimony of customers I've helped would be an uncountable number of "yeah he asked if i wanted a bag twice" or "yeah, he started scanning the next order", but I will remember that these eggs don't scan with the register scanner and instead I need to use the gun, or yeah this cheese has a barcode so small, I need to take off my glasses and type it in manually. And I automatically turn my head to the sliding door when it opens to greet customers, despite the fact that I will say "Good evening welcome in" at 2 in the afternoon or "have a good day" at 9:30 at night.

Keisi

I might’ve commented on the register thing but I just thought it was an accent or dialect thing I wasn’t familiar with, sorry about that

Jacob Nelson

I found this interesting. Its not stuff I have ever worked with (my limited retail job experience required me to memorize a lot of prices) But stuff like this is the infrastructure that props up the world so I like to learn about it.

cathoderaydude

you aren't the problem, it's other people who were straight up, explicit dicks about it

Kotanu

[X] I don't like this video because I'm in it If you want to borrow some assorted high end barcode scanners, hit me up. The modem ones have so many config options, and the old one looks crazy rastering PDF417s with a laser line

Funkmon

I run grocery stores. I have never had any interest in any of this stuff. The job is lost on me. I was a store manager at a major nationwide chain during two point of sale system upgrades, both hardware and software. I'm extremely impressed you got this system set up on your own. Ask me anything. Though I haven't used either of these software suites. Kroger does not fire employees for low items per minute. Trust me. I did regional HR for them. It's used entirely for shaming people. The coupon printer is paid for by the manufacturers and they have requirements. That's why they're in color. The P&G company is the one who doesn't want to see their products in black and white.

cathoderaydude

oh my god two upgrades. you gotta tell me war stories. were they disasters, did a ton of stuff not get moved over, did you have to deal with disagreements between the two systems mid-conversion

cathoderaydude

I have a couple neat ones already (bt unit that does 2d codes, and tomorrow I might be picking up a couple scanner scales lol) but I'll keep it in mind! also sorry for attacking you personally with the intro

Kotanu

I'm excited to learn about scanner scales! That's one piece that hasn't entered the collection yet.

Thermo [D G]

I will say with the fact that barcode scanners from the '80s are still relevant- They *can* be. Scanner scales never interact with anything not UPC, they are purpose built for that. However, a ton of scanner guns actually do need to be replaced with technology, as a lot of the times they have to scan 2D barcodes, or QR, or data matrix, or what have you. Especially the ones on self-checkouts (something I now despise having worked at a grocery store). As well as that, updating the barcode gun doesn't always mean it has to support new technologies as a lot of the time its also necessary in order to make it possible to scan things that have a hard time scanning normally. Stuff like egg carton, or metal cans (where instead of white they decided that the aluminum itself would work as the white part of a barcode), or particularly bad prints. With them being able to go anywhere (wherever the cable permits), they are usually having to scan barcodes at weird angles, oblique or even grazing azimuths, it's important to employers (and employees) that they should be able to scan stuff in non-idea circumstances, and be resistant to company urges to shape their UPCs. Misson, mission tortillas are the bane of my existence, and it always takes 4 or 5 passes over the scanner scale to get it to scan, however the gun never takes more than a fraction of a second.

felix

No interesting experience to add, just encouragement - this was great and I can't wait for more. Like you, I've consciously avoided this obvious rabbit hole, and seeing this stuff from your perspective /is/ (to me) just as fun in its own way as getting hands on with it. (Also, that separate coupon printer is wild - definitely not a thing on this side of the world.)

adorfer

having friends working in pos maintenace as in pbx, I am indeed quite interested in the topic, because they just share the silly stuff and not the basics. iow this was very welcome.

adorfer

Just ask technology connections about how bizarre dishwashers are.

adorfer

and then there are rebates, coupons and even loyalty and customer cards with totally different price charts....

adorfer

"learning job skills you don't want to do as job": indeed, that's what I am here for. like learning the regulations train drivers follow. no desire to have the job, but I love trains....

Remco

Just saw a crashed register at the local Lidl. They use Celeron G1820's at 2.7GHz with 8GB RAM. I kinda suspected lower specs.

Michael Vokabre

This was a fun video for sure! Personally I'm very fond of post office systems and stuff around the world in a similar fashion, and I once bought an NFC reader to look at transit cards but it of course went nowhere.

Joshua T Corbin

Ahhhhhh Noooo, bring back Ray-Guess-Stir! Here I thought you knew what you were doing, and pronouncing it contrarily on purpose… sad day, end of an era…

Aditya Sengupta

To be honest, I also thought it may have been a regional accent thing, but I didn’t know how to ask without feeling like I might come across as a dick so I (wisely) shut up about it, because whether or not anyone pronounces stuff correctly, when they have as much amazing content as you do — who cares about hard g vs soft g. Please don’t let the plethora of awful people out there put you off doing this. You’re one of my favorite creators and I finally took the plunge and subscribed to your patreon. Although, I am also one of those folks who has watched most of your videos with YT premium multiple times, so I’m hoping prior to this, that also boosted your income.

Funkmon

It occurs to me that I really don't have much to say - our IT department at our company was astonishingly good, and almost nothing rolled out that wasn't nearly bulletproof. EDIT: sorry I pressed enter too early. I'll update this comment. Stay tuned. 7:51 PM EST. EDIT 2: Okay this comment is longer than I thought. I do have a lot to say. 8:14 PM. EDIT 3: Okay I posted it.

Funkmon

The company has fake stores and test stores and things, so it takes YEARS for updates to hit the majority (95%+) of stores, so most of our software and hardware problems were solved by the time it hit any division at large. For example, the android based scanners I mention later in the comment and new inventory system were started in the fake stores, then launched in a couple stores near the HQ, then launched in one store per division, then two, all for months at a time, before it was pushed company wide, which was still a year long rollout. When I first started with the company the cash registers were much like they were in the 90s, at least to the end user. And this was closer to now than it was to 2000, so imagine that. There's a keyboard with buttons and a small display screen showing the price, just like the Simpsons intro. These interacted with two systems - ACE, and our internal inventory system. Both of these ran on DOS, and we accessed them through DOS shells on our Linux thinclients, or through our Windows CE handhelds. ACE was likely the original POS system the company used, but was now relegated exclusively to accounting. So if we had inventory and accounting, and that's it, how did we deal with non inventory systems, like Western Union, Lotto, Coinstair, or payments like credit cards and telecheck? Manually. So if someone wanted a lotto ticket, we would type in PLU 86411 (not the lotto ticket PLU), the amount of the total lotto transaction, and go to the Lotto POS machine. Yes. Everything had its own POS system. The Lotto POS machine printed out two receipts, one for us one for the customer, and the PLU entered it as a non inventory item on the lotto accounting line. We had bill pay PLUs, Western Union PLUs, Credit card payment PLUs, refunds for all of those, bypass PLUs, etc. Everything any of the other 7+ (!) POS systems (Lotto, 2 different bill pay systems, western union, ria, another special accounting POS, gas station POS, pharmacy POS and so on) could do, there was a PLU for it so it would be entered into ACE. If you have gone to the store and tried to rent a Rug Doctor and they say they don't know how to do it and ask you to come back when the customer service manager is there, it's cause they don't. It's a different POS system with its own security and account creation and its own set of PLUs. (Of course, a good store manager would figure something out, put in a PLU for misc inventory, sell it to you, write down your contact information, tell the customer service manager the next morning, get cussed out as she is going to have to put in the returned misc merchandise plu (yeah you can't refund it, there's a negative value PLU), fill everything out again, and so on.) That's how the company handles it. Manually. Now, when we upgraded to a Toshiba Java based system, we had a problem - our vendor agreements with the big cards meant we needed a card reader upgrade, so we got the verifone card readers, but our system was not programmed to handle those very well. As a result, we had to maintain our old Toshiba Model M buckling sleeve keyboards with the built in card reader for certain things, like reloading gift cards (but not the initial purchase), or scanning driver's licenses for telechecks (Telecheck now integrated into the POS system). So we had to take out our coin counters, and we lost a lot of money to lost change from that. Maybe $10-$20 a day gone from losing the coin cointers. The company didn't actually care though and didn't update the procedures for the stores who lost the coin counting machines - change was just straight up never counted. This resulted in me having to occasionally rush to the bank on 8 mile and ask them for change. The POS base stations didn't have enough ports. So we had two card readers at that point. Because we maintained all the old HID devices (the scanners were Motorola), the built in features in the new software for things like coinstar didn't work, as they weren't designed to handle them, but the company removed certain PLUs from ACE, so we couldn't type in the coinstar tender PLU. So we had to ring it in as other tender and get manager approval. You got manager approval by the manager walking over, typing her number, then "//" then her password. Highly insecure. The company decided to eliminate this and give us cards to approve transactions we would scan in the credit card reader. Well those got "lost" a lot. They rectumfied the issue later with the next upgrade by giving one time manager override codes, but it caused further problems, mostly logistical. I'm giving you specific examples here, but just assume they were highly variable and there were multiple). The next major upgrade was to solve the issues introduced by the last one - that is, make everything work that is in the software. And it did this by removing the old stuff. No more old keyboards. No more old drawers (yes even the drawers got replaced), new Motorola scanners. New receipt printers (incidentally, there's a special Western Union printer, Lotto printer, gas pump printer, gas station POS printer, gas station _delivery_ printer, coupon printer, and cash register printer, all of which use _different_ paper (though amusingly the self checkout receipt printers were just the normal cash register printers but hidden in the box). This meant that everything in the software worked. You pressed coinstar button, it scanned coinstar. You pressed check button, it did the check. You pressed lotto button, it did the lotto. Life was good. Except they didn't have buttons for everything and there was no way to enter the codes. So if someone had something weird, we had to go to the cash accounting room and physically enter it in, which was shockingly difficult. A later software update fixed this and allowed us to use PLUs again, though many were removed. It meant that our granular accounting got more vague, but it was fine. I talked about the manager override function. To get this, you had to log in to the POS. The problem with that is we were a union company and the management team (me) was not allowed to touch the POS, as that's taking away from the union members. I wasn't allowed to go into the accounting room either. Well, my employees have always (thank God) respected that I was trying to help them, so I got my master accounting login and my manager login for the POS system, but in other stores much more militant about managers doing bargaining unit work, they had to find a customer service manager to do the override, who might be doing who knows what, and it would irritate the customer. The old solution was that trusted employees knew manager login info. The next solution was a bagger would run and find the CS manager and grab her override card. The new solution had to be the customer service manager ending whatever she was doing, logging in to a POS unit, printing an override, going to the new place, scanning the override and putting in her info. Annoying. But overall it all worked fine. They did not have to upgrade the self-checkout host PCs when they did this, though they were upgrading the enclosures and the software all the time. Those, at the time of my leaving (2023) were still often Pentium 3s. I know. But they hosted very little, they just connected to the server. The self-checkout upgrades were almost always easy, good, and had no problems...though they did freeze occasionally and had to be rebooted, or the receipts or coins would get stuck and we would have to open them up and shake them, but that's no big deal. Likewise, the gas station POS system was essentially bulletproof as well. It was a Toshiba system like in the store but used maybe Radiant? Or something like that? Very few issues with it; it was upgraded to touch screen very early on and our gas station employees were so locked down they couldn't do anything (cause they always stole). Lotto had to be hand counted, etc. The gas station POS system however was not able to talk to the inventory system in the store, so the gas station had to have its own inventory system, which didn't have any ability to connect to our ordering system or anything, but it did talk to ACE, our accounting system. This meant that the gas station inventory was essentially hand counted and hand ordered. The gas station lead had to count everything she had once a week, write down what she wanted the drug/gm manager to order, and then he would order it for her. Probably. The grocery products were taken from the store. There was a log for what was taken to the gas station, but to find it you had to look for it. So if we saw no, say, Faygo, on the shelf but the inventory system said 8 we would say "oh it must be in the gas station." Or, we exit out of that screen, and remember this is a DOS Shell running on Windows CE, go back to the main menu, go down to the gas station list, scroll through line by line until we see Faygo. Do you think we did that often? With the coming of ecommerce pickup and such, it became much more important to have correct inventory. This is because if you are a customer and you are down the cookie aisle, you see oreos, golden oreos, Hydrox, store oreos, and so on but you don't notice that there are no Mega Stuf, so you don't buy any and are none the wiser. You leave happy. If you are on the website and you order Mega Stuf Oreos you want those goddamn huge ass Oreos. You're much more sensitive to inventory inaccuracies. This caused the company to completely overhaul the inventory system - the old one is gone. It does not get used. The new one is web based, and I was told it's custom. The new way to interact with it is with Zebra android phone scanner thingies, and you cannot access it on the thinclients. It's really good because the POS system can update inventory in real time on the new system, as opposed to needing a store close command to write the changes in the old system. The ordering system and receiving system is intact, with the new inventory system essentially writing to and reading from those text based software systems at set intervals, and the handhelds read from the inventory server. This was a few years ago (I stopped working when my parents got sick and died, and now I am a flight attendant about to be laid off, so I'm going back into the industry), but I believe I am still not allowed to share a lot of the details. I hope this was not boring. If you jog my memory I might be able to remember specific issues, but most of the time everything worked swimmingly.

Funkmon

Oh and another thing - the Pharmacy actually has 2 systems, but I had a personal experience with some of the security issues which lead to the company making manager overrides increasingly secure. I think I am unable to disclose the details of this, but in broad strokes the pharmacist must scan his pharmacist code to dispense product. Not to sell it, but to dispense it. Two different systems. Anyway, the pharmacy got tired of logging people out of the POS system and having to get the pharmacist to okay the dispensing of the drugs and started just using eachother's logins. This is illegal but not uncommon. Watch at your pharmacy. The pharmacy techs may have a barcode they already had printed and use it to scan things - that's likely a similar system and it's supposed to be one time use. Anyway, they were caught doing this and we had to fire everyone. lol

Funkmon

One more thing - when I referred to manually integrating different POS systems I mean it. It's not like two inventory systems. They all had a way to take tender or produce a sale, and we simply bypassed that and ran it through our main POS system, making sure to keep the receipts from the other POS systems. It didn't have to be that way.

Funkmon

I find this correct as well. Wireless guns will easily pick up the funny UPCs, but the inline scanners have much more difficulty. Our old scanners at my store had a red laser and had similar levels of difficulty.

Funkmon

It is also true that most produce at my former national grocery store chain has a by count and by weight PLU. It's usually related, like bananas are 4011, organic bananas are 94011, and pieced bananas are 4012, etc, but they don't tell you this. Genuinely try it sometime. Replace the first number or last number with other numbers to see what comes up!

Funkmon

What do you guys mean by hand? Here's what I expect from a normal POS system - 1. Total is 7.81 2. Customer gives you $10 3. You type 1000 into register 4. Register tells you $2.19 is change Are you saying QT just has a button called "cash" or something and it says "okay" and only you know it was $10 and you do the math in your head to give him the right change?

Xaviette Katzenfrau

Pretty much, yes. Register says total is $7.81, customer hands you a $10 bill, you tap Cash, and the drawer pops open and the transaction closes. There is no way to input the amount of cash they gave you. The transaction does not leave the screen until you start scanning/tapping a new transaction (so you can print a receipt if the customer wants without having to pull it back up) but it does not tell you the change. At QT you are expected to know how to count up from 7.81 to 10. You can talk out loud if you want as you pull the change. Grab pennies, 82, 83, 84, 85, grab a nickel, 90, grab a dime, $8, grab 2 dollar bills, $10, hand to the customer. It helps to remember you should never need more than 4 pennies, 1 nickel, 2 dimes, or 3 quarters when getting the coins. The only thing that would consistently trip me up was when the customer handed over cash /and/ coins because I would forget where I need to start counting from. It seems strange, but QT as a company heavily prioritizes speed - you'd be able to take 2 customers on either side of the register, and you are expected to get in a very good groove. Standing around staring at a number and trying to get exact change for 30 seconds is, to the company, a significant slowdown. They'd honestly rather you get the change wrong, so long as you're doing it quickly. (Obviously they still tracked if you were losing a lot of money to bad change and you could get extra training/in trouble for it). Very weird company to work for.

Javier Matusevich

Learning jobs we wouldn’t have or the trappings thereof is pretty much on point. You know us so well. Now I want to go and get a thermal printer for no reason.

thenewdiagrams

Not really sure if it was implied that all thermal printers run at 24V, but I am aware of an exception to this - thermal printers designed to be used in vehicles, which run off the 12V car battery. I've got a bit of experience connecting these to taximeters to produce receipts for journeys, which is still an obligation on the driver in some jurisdictions. They're usually some kind of cursed RJ connector with 12V and rs232 signalling but I've never seen two with the same pinout. I believe RJ is chosen because it's far more vibration resistant than e.g. a DE-9 (just assume everyone in the field loses the screws or doesn't bother tightening them).

Xaviette Katzenfrau

It really is a miracle most of them work as well as they do.

Douglas Bell

Omg, I work for Cyberdata! I had a feeling their name would come up in one of your videos, since the company has done development in a bunch of different hardware niches. I certainly wasn't expecting it to be usb cables lol. I'm definitely gonna ask my coworkers about the website.

Natalie Schneider

I feel like we should require cis people to call it the port sex instead of the port gender. Not because its a more accurate interpretation of the analogy that doesn't perpetuate the idea of genitals as being the same as gender, but because it would be really funny to make cis people say sex more.

Natalie Schneider

Also as a side note now I really want to dive into one of these databases and see how they are structured.

Chris J

I really enjoyed this one! Retroactively I wish PoweredUsb could have been more of a thing for normal consumers, since I think it's unfortunate USB <=2 is/was the default power delivery for tons of portable devices given its limitations.

Kris Asick

In the beginning of the video when talking about why we're all wired to be interested in these things, you reminded me of how I came to NOT care about bar codes. In the early 2000s in my late teens I saw a joke on the TV show 3rd Rock from the Sun about "decoding the bar code" and I thought about it for a moment and I was like, "Wait... can you even store that much data in one...?" A few years later when a scam product was being pushed to encode huge amounts of data on printed sheet of 8.5"x11" paper and was being debunked by everyone, that made me interested in learning more about data encoding and I quickly realized that even if you could store data into a standard UPC barcode it'd hardly be anything; maybe five characters at BEST, or just the numbers of the code itself. I rapidly lost interest in certain forms of technology such as bar code scanners the moment I realized how incredibly basic the functionality of these things really were. Also, I knew about powered USB ports but never saw one, wondered for the longest time WHY I never saw one, and then this video helped to illustrate those whys very conclusively. ;)

Greg

At 51:13, the "Hosiden" connector is intended to be pronounced "Ho-she-den"—the company's name is ホシデン株式会社 ("Hoshiden Inc."), and although the official spelling is phonetic, the logo suggests that it's a contraction of some phrase along the lines of Hoshi Denki ("Star Electric").

Funkster

This was delightful and I can't wait for more. Also as an owner of two receipt printers and one barcode scanner, I feel very seen.

Calum

Thank you CRD! Great video as usual. I used to work in retail and its fun to look back at the horrible yellowing white plastic early 00s LCD tills and learn that they are actually quite interesting underneath. Good work!

Calum

Also I definitely want to hear all about the features of the software!

Gabriel Quirouet

Great video as usual! I work as a field tech and I did sub contract work for POS Maintenance and upgrades. I worked on a software/hardware upgrade in shell gas stations/convinience stores. I got sent on site after like an hour of training to reimage the back store's POS that controls the pumps, upgraded pumps software, replaced pin pads and scanners and things like that. I also did some upgrades in some Canada Post centers where I replaced some signature pads, scanners, scales, and their custom made keyboards. One time I went to a Tim Horton's to diagnose the drive through screen that wasn't properly displaying menus. And to top it all off, I went to McDonald's to service the self serve kiosk. Turns out the UPS had died in the kiosk. It's really nice to bring back these memories watching the video. I really look forward for more videos about POS systems!

Totoro

Hi. Sorry I'm a little late responding here. At the end of the video you asked if we (read: I) liked/wanted more like this. YES! These deep dives of yours are always fascinating to me. I know--knew--nothing of such systems and really enjoyed the insight. I suspect that the majority of your audience are nerds like me. So keep this stuff coming Thanks!

sen

Hey, I’d fallen way behind on YouTube but broke my ankle today and badly needed a distraction. This video was perfect and I love this concept as one of those nerds that loves learning about hardware that services fields I don’t work in! Thank you for putting it together and I am excited about more POS videos :)

cathoderaydude

Sorry to hear about your ankle, glad I could do something to help!