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Video: Intro to Cash Registers (Patreon)

Published:
2025-11-16 19:00:49
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hey! It's the next video in the previously created series! And it's not the one you expected! Probably!

I explain all my reasoning in the video so I won't rehash it here, but in short, this was the last of several different ideas that I tried and discarded before settling on this one. I know I'm not expected to explain the delays in my production process (i just signed up for hbomberguy's patreon and it's extremely funny seeing him make the same mistake i have of Ever Saying What I'm Doing Before Finishing It, let alone Saying Something Is Almost Done And Will Be Out Soon) but for what it's worth, I would have had something out four weeks ago if I hadn't kept looking at the scripts and thinking "wow, this is incomprehensible." This 1:47:00 video is the easier watch than what I would have produced if I hadn't stopped myself and gone back to square one.

Mind you, I am kind of downplaying the utter chaos of my life lately. Among other things: I had to stop myself from making a post about this several times, because I decided I was too emotional to say anything informative nor actionable, but I had to put a cat to sleep a few weeks ago - and then the very next week another cat got deathly ill. I spent a fortune making her better, and now it seems like she's still sick, maybe? Or maybe not? And either way there's no real explanation as to why? So this has been consuming an enormous amount of my mental and emotional bandwidth and making it incredibly difficult to concentrate on anything.

All the same, job's a job and quality matters, so, given the huge breadth of this topic, do please let me know if you spot any errors. I am aware of a couple minor ones (like the map of payment methods in europe that technically only counts travelers out of the UK - but since the correct map makes the exact same point, I consider it moot) and there's also probably some regionalisms, e.g. maybe checks are still more popular in some places than where I've lived, but I think taken as a whole it's close to the mark.

Files

Intro To Cash Registers: Basic Registering

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

Comments

Algoinde

Thank you for going to such lengths to entertain us, couldn't be thankful enough. As for the cats... same happened to our 2 brothers. One passed away, the other immediately got worse after, and it felt that it was both from his own grief and ours too. We made sure to walk him outside everyday, look at birds, gave him lots of cuddles and he got better, thankfully. Wishing that it'll be okay.

Michael Vokabre

I'm glad that you're continuing entertaining and educating us, and you have our support if you need to take a break, and virtual hugs if appropriate.

Cysio the Catdog

As for your '70s cash register, many businesses in Poland used this kind of thing even in the '10s, and many people who only need a cash register because it's legally mandated use a miniature, battery-powered version of such a thing. Tablet POSes aren't really much of a thing here, if anything your local coffee shop is gonna have a bulky touchscreen POS

Strawberry Daquiri

oh yeah, there are antique stores still to this day that ring you up with a calculator and a yellow receipt pad. :3

Chas Becht

Sorry to hear about the cat misfortune. I've been through that and it's always rough.

Mac Folklore Radio

oh no — not Udon and Soba (presumably)! :'( I'm so sorry. :(

schtiehve

I'm sorry to hear about your cats. I just wanted to let you know, I've been of your patron for a while because I was unemployed but I'm back working now and it's so worth it even just for that "It does support Rust" joke. 💜

omixann

Funny that you mention the the stereotypical European screeching at American oddities because checks are actually still something people use and expect here in France. Coming from Spain, I didn't expect two neighboring European countries to have such differences with respect to tender: my first time ever seeing a check was here in France, where I was asked for them a handful of times to pay for stuff.

Kazimieras Celiešius

As someone who works for a relatively modern POS company right now, I’m pretty sure this video should have been in the mandatory training material for when I first started.

Cooper Harasyn

I think this is a phenomenal video and appreciate your efforts to make it digestible for those without retail experience. I didn't notice any errors. Wishing you and your cat the best.

Loading_M_

At 34:42, re the rounding to 5 cents - it's important to note that most products weren't sold to stores in retail packaging at this time. This gives the store owner the freedom to also change the unit size, so if they wanted to sell something at 1 cent per item, the owner could simply bundle 5 together and charge 5 cents per bundle. I also wouldn't be surprised if cashiers were instructed to first enter the larger items, then simply add up the cost of the small items and round up to the nearest 5 cents as a final line item. At 1:04:35, re modern check writing: As a young person in America, specifically the Midwest, I think you mostly got it right. Checks are still useful in some ways, such as gifts (since it's a physical representation, and you can pick the amount) (and I've started writing checks occasionally since credit card fees have gone up). It's also possible that some of the younger people writing checks are small business owners, where it might make sense to handle (at least some) business transactions via check.

t

Rename cat tier patrons to cash register tier? Fun vid, I hope it tenders many new subscribers

EyeMWing

First, catposting, good or bad, informative or not, actionable or not, is *always* justified.

Nick Kourpias

I'm so sorry to hear about your cats, take as much time as you need and don't rush yourself too much for making videos. I and many others of your patrons will stick around!

Crash Cash

I write a check every month so I can walk down the block and put it in my lawn care guy's mailbox. That's a real niche situation, but you can see how handling it any other way would vastly overcomplicate things. It's just a tiny (but important) step above directly putting cash there.

seagull

love you CRD

Crash Cash

I just got my 1st credit card that doesn't have the number embossed on the front. I was explaining to the yung un at work how we used the "clickclack" imprinter to make a carbon copy of the transaction using the embossed numbers, and the stressful times we had to call (yes, on the phone) BankAmericard or Master Card to see if they had enough credit.

Crash Cash

It's kind of telling that the most prominent phone number on that Royal 9150 is tech support/customer service... it's even listed twice.

Joe Thatcher

I would be interested in seeing a history of payment card capture, especially in the electronic era. A while ago I briefly dipped my toe into it and at least here (New Zealand), there are multiple payment networks where every operator has its own brand of terminal they use (nowadays Ingenico or Verifone) and their own software loaded onto it. As far as I understand it's basically a whole embedded system (hell, a lot of them nowadays run Android) with a secure element, magstripe and smart card readers and UI bolted onto it. Of course, this means that if you want to integrate a card reader into your software the actual SDK and documentation comes from the operator - from a "public" point of view Verifone/Ingenico/Pax/etc just provides the hardware. Since at that point every possible POS system already exists and you're weird for having to support a bespoke one, the only SDKs they give you are either an ancient, buggy DLL that communicates with a program that was written when Windows 98 was the hot new app, or "contact us". Maybe in the US Verifone has a more business-to-retailer-type arrangement (and I know that now Square/Stripe/your bank will give you a reader thingy that connects directly to your phone) but I've always found it interesting how just getting set up to accept payments seems to require at least two middlemen between you and the bank.

Michaela Pereckas

Back in the old days I wrote out a check for the amount of rent that was due and put it in an envelope and put a stamp on that. Now, the company that does the transaction takes it out of my account without the stamp but they also charge me $1.50 for the privilege of paying what I owe, and I'm not convinced that's better.... All those years before someone realized they could charge us an extra fee *for paying them!*

Crash Cash

Talking about cash back: So at my local grocery store (in Central Florida) when you pay with your debit card, they give you an option for cash back. Is this not a thing elsewhere? Also, here in Titusville, which is a very small town, 75% of the restaurants are either cash or check. No debit/credit cards accepted. Edit: or accepted with a 10% or even 15% surcharge. Edit: actually this is rapidly changing since Culver's moved in a year ago, and 1) they don't pull this sh*t, 2) they serve consistently good food and 3) they are open past 6pm, so they are ab-so-lutely coining it.

Alfred Klek

Have you tried zeeing out that Dresser Wayne POS yet? The one at the Chevron I worked at spat out about 10-15 FEET (!) of register paper every night. Also, so sorry to hear about your cats :(

cathoderaydude

God I don't know that I've Z'ed it out yet, I've run x tapes and they're definitely long but I'm not sure about 15 ft, I'll have to do that. I will say, out of the box, this thing is ridiculous about reports, you sign in, you sign out, It just goes hog on the thermal printer

Alfred Klek

It might have been doing some other weird junk because it was hooked up to the gas pumps, or maybe it was just configured incorrectly. If yours did the same thing you'd notice, it was a very silly amount of tape.

Z

That Royal and the CC terminal take me back to my dad's country gas station in the 2000s. I spent so much time customizing that thing while I was bored. I can think of at least one emergency trip to Staples to buy a cash register.

Z

Now I've gotta look up why it was called "Z'ing" out. So much nostalgia in this video and thread.

Tnarg42

I grew up in the shadow of NCR, and anybody who's spent time around Dayton, Ohio knows that in the early 20th century, they made money hand over fist. By the 1970s, they were making those mechanical cash registers better than anyone, and rapidly sliding into irrelevance. By the 80s, NCR was desperately trying to reinvent itself, trying to jump into computers (didn't work out so well) and ATMs (worked out better). I got to go on an elementary school "computer club" tour of a sales room at their headquarters where they had all their new ATMs setup for demonstration. Somewhere I still have a piece of fake cash they dispensed on that tour. In the 2000s, NCR got a juicy tax abatement to move their headquarters out of Dayton and down to Atlanta. The legacy of their manufacturing operation is still around here, but the company is long gone. Just another pile of rust left behind here in the rust belt.

Rocko Rottie

Being from Delaware, I was briefly confused by the change for $1.95 out of $5 being $2.86 because I always forget sales tax is a thing until I go to Maryland or something once every few months to go to microcenter or ikea.

The King Of Rhye

Speaking about nobody using checks any more...I'm 48, and I've never written one in my life. Definitely remember my parents using them, not even too longs ago. Though, I did have to pay rent on my apartment with money orders about 8 years ago.

Rocko Rottie

I've never dealt with them because I'm only 21 and my first job was 5 years ago, but it's always funny remembering that card terminals used to need a phone line and either about a minute per transaction to dial in to the payment handler to run the card, or the merchant just had to trust it would go through and the terminal would spend a while at the end of the night sending them all in. (and ofc the imprint and calling the bank before that.

Rocko Rottie

If you want something ridiculous on reports, I have a Smith Corona CoronaFax310i. It has no display. The only interface to configure it (number of rings, your number to print on that little row at the top, speed dial programming, etc.) is through blindly entering sequences of keystrokes and getting a good or bad beep, and printing a report afterwards and hoping you didn't miss a key. There's literally a shortcut to get it to print a quick programming guide because of how obtuse the interface is. Just as an example, if I want to set it to answer on the 4th ring, I have to hit [FUNC] 3 01 # 4 [START]. It is at least thermal paper, so the consumables are cheap, and it only uses the little bit of length needed to print the help and settings things. If you want to set the name that shows up at the top of the page, you do some string to enter that mode, then for each character you have to do that dance of cycling through characters like texting on a flip phone but without T9, and remember that the first press always starts with the number, AND remember to hit * after each character. And remember, there is NO display to see what you're doing as you're doing it. And just as a little cherry on top of the pain cake, it forgets everything if power is lost (to be fair, that might just be a dead RAM battery, but I don't want to take it apart and possibly damage it) Also, fun thing about it, because of how old it is, it doesn't have any storage for unprinted pages. If it runs out of paper during a fax, it just hangs up and makes a sad beep.

Rocko Rottie

On your point about checks not really existing in the US anymore, because I just got to that part of the video, I ordered a box of 400 from my bank when I set up my first account like 4 years ago because they were free, and I figured I might as well. I have used 4 of them in that entire time. And they were all just me paying mom back for my portion of the group car insurance we were on at the time while I had a summer job and couldn't make that payment in the usual form of being the home handyman/IT guy. After that, we realized this was dumb when we both have accounts at the same bank, and she trusts me with her card and PIN (and even if not, it's like you say, two people in an elevator, one farts, not hard to figure it out), so I could just take cash out of my account and put it in hers, because as you know, that was and still is one of the fastest ways to do that (and basically the only one that doesn't involve a third party service) in the US because don't get Europe's IBAN fanciness. And to your point about cash fraud potentially being more likely in Europe, I was on vacation in Germany back in July, and I didn't get screwed over, so I can't speak to outright theft from the business. But when I got a drink at a kiosk in the U-Bahn, I was charged €3 as the drink was labeled and got my €2 change, but the guy entered it as €2.50 but also put the full €3 in the drawer. My friend guessed it was likely some kind of tax fraud by lowering their income if it was intentional. Also, I had a Sharp cash register at one point when I was 12 or so (it was a $20 thrift store find and it was fun to mess with) and at one point I decided to run a Z report to see what it printed out. Cue me being concerned and confused when it started printing on its little roller wheel printer (the kind in cheap adding machines) and just kept going for like 2 minutes straight. At one point I even tried to unplug it to cancel whatever demons I had unleashed, but when I plugged it back in IT JUST RESUMED like nothing happened. That thing was going to print its report come hell or high water.

Gordon Bolton

I came here to make a comment about NCR! As a kid, my Dad worked for a UK retailer called John Menzies (I worked there myself in my teens), and they had NCR cash registers, linked to an NCR TOWER/32 68020 based minicomputer run ing AT&T Unix. There were a number of terminals through the store, that managed stock, payroll etc. from what I've been able to find and from memory, the registers were some variant of the 2123 system (going g by pictures in the 1991 NCR Product documentation I was able to find) or its immediate predecessor. At some point in the 1990s, these registers (or "tills" as we call them in the UK) were replaced with a later NCR POS terminal, and the TOWERs replaced with commodity PCs running SCO Unix and the same store system as before. It was called RSS (Retail Store System), which I haven't been able to find anything on anywhere. NCR's TOWER based POS Back office system was called Distributed Store System (DSS) which I strongly suspect RSS was a customised version of. These systems started going I to the JM shops in the mid to late 1980s (they weren't in the shop Dad was in in 1986, but went into another shop he ran after a 4 year break in 1990. The tills were linked to a "master" till, which had a secondary master till in case of failure, and in some shops the master had a cassette deck in it for backup (this wasn't used in JM as far as I am aware, the 2123 could be used without the TOWER computer in smaller less sophisticated installations. The master till would have an end of day process that would transfer the days sales from all the slave tills (which would send sales to the master in real time) and print off a Z total report. I can still hear the sound of the print off from the dot matrix printer, and it had a real musical quality to it, particularly the end of the report that included a series of line feeds at the end - the cadence of it is as familiar to me as the sound of modem negotiation, even over 25 years since I last heard it. I've tried and failed to find any video from a JM shop with the tills audible, it's a lost sound from my childhood.

Logan Hartmann

I’m sorry for your loss and the emotional hardship you’re going through. Hang in there, and thanks as always for the great content ❤️

Brad Wilmot

OK, who else wanted to see Gav "go full Office Space on this thing!"

sdomi

"Beverage! I won!" is such a powerful moment i love this energy

Simon Mikkelsen

I just finished the video and it is truly awesome! Thank you for putting all that work into it ❤️👌

Stuart Rose

wait your FIRST job was at an e-waste recycling facility?! the CRD origin story is coming into focus...

Hafkie

Missed this yesterday until I saw they upload today. Based on what I gathered the few times I stopped in the streams over the weeks I had a feeling things were rough with the cats. I'm sorry about your loss Gravis. </3 thanks for the videos and by all means, it's totally understandable if you gotta take time. I aint goin anywhere.

Michael Vokabre

Speaking about enforcement — about ten years ago, Georgia (the country) decided to enforce usage of cash registers for tax collection purposes because both the people and the merchant didn't care if the transactions went without the machine. For that, they made all receipts to contain a code for a state lottery, this way the person would request a receipt because there was a slim chance to win something. I myself was visiting when the system was in play, and it honestly motivated me to ask for receipt for even small purchases. A very clever system.

Michael Vokabre

I never even handled checks in my life living in Russia, Korea, until i moved to Israel — as in Israel the checks are the most common means to pay the rent. You, a renter, write the owner 12 checks (the most common contract is 1 year, 12 months), each with the value of monthly payment, and each check is signed for a different month. The owner can not get all the money immediately and thus is motivated to not kick you out, but at the same time has security that you'll keep on your 12 month contract as it's illegal to have checks "bounced".

cathoderaydude

This is fascinating because I've heard the same is true in Taiwan

Michael Vokabre

At the place I currently rent the owner also cleverly asked for a check with a blank sum signed for the municipality and another for the electric company — this way if i don't pay my utility payments and leave without doing so leaving the owner with a debt, they'll just fill in the necessary sum and mail it to the municipality and the electric company. And they can't get money to their pocket because the checks are signed specifically for the municipality and the electric company.

Michael Vokabre

Oof, i just visited Taiwan, but I haven't heard of this, but after a search, yep! So i missed my opportunity to win ten million Taiwanese dollars! But it's a bit tedious because in Georgia you just entered the no. into the system and it shows you if you won anything, but in Taiwan they instead put up the winning numbers and you yourself had to check.

George Dorn

I get the feeling that youtube's anti-spam is going to wig out about a lot of comments on this one, especially if people are talking about how credit card scams and POS systems work... I accidentally left the [dot] in cash[dot]app and it auto-deleted it _and_ the corrected one.

George Dorn

ps sorry about the cats. been through that so many times myself, and it doesn't get easier so much as it gets predictable. it's a cruel god that gave us such long lives and our non-human companions such short ones.

Will Dunn

Oh, worth mentioning Gravis - the part of the new video talking about entering 199 and the register or adding machine automatically adding the decimal to make it "$1.99" made me think of this. When I was working at a restaurant POS integration startup about 8 years ago, one thing that I think most of them do, and that we had to do, was treat all money in pennies. Nothing costs $15.49. It costs 1549 cents. So, I think this is kind of mechanically implied for cash registers, but I definitely saw POS software where it was explicit - the decimal is basically just a UI display element for human consumption and is effectively ignored in the software. I dunno, I guess people who make POS software just hate floats and always want to use ints. I'm pretty sure even the functions that did stuff that would create floats, like calculating tax, was just of the variety "takes integer as input, does calculation and rounding inside the function, returns amount of tax as integer" so that the running total was always an integer.

Will Dunn

Oooh, good idea for a video. I remember going to J.C. Penny's to get school clothes with my mom in the 80's and when you paid with a card they did the whole carbon copy impression thing with the CHUNK CHUNK thing you moved back and forth over the card - so obviously they were processing them in batches later. Then there's the normal verifone swipe things that had a built in modem that would call some long distance number for authorization, and then those things went internet enabled, and then now we have tap to pay with cards and phones and all sorts of stuff. I know that the main reason a lot of the mom and pop POS's used a verifone swiper was for PCI compliance reasons, and maybe that's a relevant topic too.

Christopher Davies

Since floating point numbers are approximations that concentrate most of their precision in part of their range most amenable to the human mind, this makes sense. The terrain going crazy at far edges of the minecraft world is a fun easter egg, however the taxman does not appreciate fun easter eggs.

Christopher Davies

I've never in my entire life written a cheque to pay a bill in a store, but I'm old enough to have seen my parents do it. Those little cheque guarantee machines are a relic of a departed age that you could still see gathering dust in supermarket POS cubicles for years and years. I wish I'd paid more attention to what year they were finally cleared out as totally obsolete.

abbeydokie

literally no other content creator as of the last few years has been able to keep my attention span locked in like i was with this video. maybe its cause i'm stuck in retail hell and constantly look at the machines and computers behind the scenes to keep my mind off the mind-numbing tasks my job requires lol. not to ramble too much, but my job still has an IBM 3153 terminal in the pricing office that is STILL functional and connected via serial. its dog slow, no one uses it, and support doesn't want it because they can't just give it to another store to use. so when i get to learn about old ass machines that used to rule the roost, i get very very very excited to sit my ass down and learn. so thank you for the wonderful content over the years. you make this appalachian trans woman very happy every time you upload, so i hope that means something on an individual level. and i'm sorry for your loss as well. <3

BTGDelta

Also "back in the day" those $xx.99 prices weren't that ingratiated as nowadays.

For the Birbs (Jim Hooke)

Yet another awesome video. Even better kno2ing you've had a rough time of late. Cheers

The Wooniest Woona

I didn't care one lick about cash registers and POS systems, and yet you've kept me entertained through two videos about them now. You have a legit gift for story telling.

Michael Vokabre

P.P.S. When renting a space at an art gallery in Jaffa where I sold my arts until a few months ago I actually had no register or even an adding machine — I wrote paper receipts in a book which makes carbon copies (in case anyone needed them, nobody actually did). This worked because I did less than ten transactions a day. When selling my arts online (which shipment) i to write a reciept as of recently. Considering there are this kind of books sold in every office depot in Israel, it's a very common thing for folks like me. Instead of a card payment there's payment with a electronic money application, and once when a foreign visitor wanted to buy of me I just did a paypal transaction on the spot.

Magnus Köhler

This kind of video is why I'm a patreon. I appreciate the work you put in. Bajoran war orphan fund got me good.

Gabriel Quirouet

Yet another very well produced video! I remembered my first student job in this video, which was being a gas station attendant at an independant gas station. Nowadays it has been bought by Parkland. Anyway, we had a terminal to process card payments, and a calculator. Not even a cash register. Just a simple drawer in the counter for the money. We did have some local companies leave cards at the store and we would use a credit card imprinter to record sales for a fleet of trucks. For example, the local fire department had one of those cards. Then, each month, someone responsible would come by and pay the bill. P.S.: I want to mention, I found a Sharp Memo Master 100 (EL-6073) and created an entry for Cash Register Dude. Any ideas for a bogus phone number and fax number?

Pierre

I must admit I didn't think a hour forty-seven video on cash registers would have held my attention but it was extremely interesting and informative, things I've noticed but never gave real though to. Well done in getting me interested in something I didn't think I would. Also I'm now strangely craving chicken tenders. I've always wondered why some countries don't display the price including tax, over here in South Africa the price you see is the price you pay including taxes. Its not like you have a choice in paying tax or not 😜. Sorry about you furbabies man, really shitty thing to deal with.

Mat Fordon

I am so glad that everyone just wants you to rip on whatever your interests are, regardless of what it is. I think that people just want you to find the topics that drive your passionate curiosity to the max, because you produce content that is more entertaining. Also, I've been in a Discord server run by someone who has been restoring mechanical cash registers for a few years. I also got to run a few checks while working at K-Mart in 2006/2007 on IBM POS 100 systems..... I'm also only like 4 years older than you and have at least 1 checkbook.... from acquiring a set of them in 2008.

Pietro Gagliardi

I know I'm late to the party but: in response to my comment on the previous video, I'm now extremely conflicted about the ethics of picking that simplesale project back up ever... What would a fair system look like in a world where cashiers are paid fairly (if even to the point where tipping isn't needed)?

Riemann Zeta-Jones

I've had a question for years that I've tried to find the answer to, but have never been satisfied with one. Knowing what I know about computer science, I didn't understand how the technology existed in 1970 to perform what appears to be image recognition (albeit at resolution measured in single digits with one bit per pixel). I know how you'd implement it today, and I believe I understand how it was done in the 90s, but before computers could do, like, efficient linear algebra?

Riemann Zeta-Jones

I apologize if this question is incoherent; I'm posting under the influence

cathoderaydude

i am drunk, hello. i would require more detail on your question to give a coherent answer but are you referring to barcode scanners? because those work as simple bitstreams: the scanner contains a mechanism that causes a laser to trace a linear path at a constant speed, and then there's a light sensor that's sensitive to only the wavelength of the laser (achieved through filters) and the output of that sensor is fed into, say, a schmitt trigger, which produces a "1" if it sees "black" (that is, more darkness than a certain threshold) and a 0 if it sees "white" (anything below that threshold.)the end result is that as the laser scans across a barcode, you get a series of 1s and 0s. now imagine if you fed that output into a shift register, with the clock input controlled by an oscillator synchronized to the laser's scan rate. that would dice up the output into quantized bits, so now you have a series of buckets - let's say, 128 of them - each containing a 0 or a 1. okay, now you have a bitmap, but it's like 128 bits. it's trivial to walk across that with even an ancient 70s CPU and look for a pattern that fits certain algorithmic requirements, and validate it with a checksum bit. this is speculation to some extent but my point is: if you imagine that part of the work is being done by mechanical mechanisms and analog circuitry, does it make it easier to accept?

Riemann Zeta-Jones

oh man thanks v much for that insight! and lmao yes, I meant barcode scanners. I think I understand now, imagining it as a search along a bitstream using shift registers, I can comprehend how that could be done with 1970s circuitry in real-time

Riemann Zeta-Jones

Lol Usagi Electric literally put out a video today about barcode scanners, and answers this question by pointing out that UPCs start and end with a known pattern, so that's how it can compensate for perspective I guess. It's still hard for me to picture how 70's-era circuitry could pull off doing that compensation, verifying the checksum, and then searching a database all in real time, but I have way fewer gaps in my understanding thanks to you two now

Elsie Hupp

Not on the topic of cash registers but on the topic of the video production: Something I find mildly visually distracting in the set design is how the row of bookcases in the background doesn’t have a visually continuous horizontal line across the top because the vertical side boards of the bookcases extend beyond the top of each bookcase. If you want to have a cleaner look, you could create a countertop using a long, continuous board and a 1x2 (or bullnose) lip, stained in basically the same color as the bookcases, which would create visually stronger, visually heavier horizontal line. Of course, you may not consider this worth the effort; I just personally enjoy projects like this myself.

epic__beard

An hour and three quarters long video on cash register operation? No thanks. Oh, it's by Gravis? Clear my schedule, I'm watching. As usual, you gave a great breakdown of what some old tech is, how it worked, and dove into the why of each. I really enjoy this stuff and I'm so glad you're doing it. I never thought I'd want to know so much about cash registers, or POS, but now I do.

Funkmon

This is incidental, but I feel I shouldn't comment on this publicly. At my national grocery store chain where I was management and HR, we did not find that theft was the major cause of shrink. Usually it was bad inventory management. While this can be caused by employees stealing product, and I have certainly fired a few for it, it's mostly just...not doing the extremely tedious parts of the job. Each order goes into an inventory system, which is not actually the store inventory system, but more like a warehouse inventory system. We are supposed to check what we received versus what we got in store. This is impractical, so the company suggested we do it by looking at products on the shelf with low numbers or zeros. We then check our shipment receipt AND our computer ordering inventory. These are different systems and at midnight the shipping inventory rolls into the computer ordering inventory as long as the shipment is marked as received. So if we have no Friskies on the shelf, we look at the printed shipping receipt, and if it says we got a case, we make a report saying the Friskies did not make it. If the shipment says 0, we check our computer system. It says we have a case. We do NOT have a case, or it would be out (the back rooms are shockingly small), so someone either stole a whole case, or one supposedly came in, but it didn't actually, and we didn't adjust it on our inventory. Each department has scheduled section rotation days where we go through and check the dates on our packages. However, this is often not done. It is tedious. Then we have to throw out 4 things of bologna because they expired. This shit is the vast majority of shrink. With modern camera systems it's easy to catch cashiers stealing, so that's essentially gone as a huge risk. What cashiers do now to steal is usually scams I'm not comfortable sharing that look legitimate to the camera and are accounted for in the accounting software that you would only notice if you actually looked into the transaction log or noticed trends. By the time we notice, they often have yoinked hundreds or thousands, usually in gift cards, and we get them when it's a felony amount. For general theft, we see it and often don't do anything because it's more trouble than it's worth often times. Our E-commerce clerk brings home a rotisserie chicken. The grocery guy yoinks some Gain. But that's miniscule compared to our inventory mismanagement, and at some point you steal while asset protection in the headquarters is watching. Then they look back at your shifts and watch your future ones. If it's recurring behavior you get fired. And by recurring I mean like...more than 5 times. If it seems to be an occasional issue, they call the regional HR manager (my role at one time), who calls the store manager (my role at one time) and the store manager makes a choice. This is all done in secret because with union employees, if we fire a guy for stealing $1000 in cash and don't fire a guy for accidentally forgetting to buy a Snickers, the union argues that the no stealing policy is being unfairly enforced and the $1000 guy gets his job back to steal again. And they're right, but for the wrong reasons. The management team has some idea of who is stealing and what they're stealing and it's small potatoes. Even if everyone in my store stole $10 of stuff a day, it's nothing compared to a lost case of striploin. And they don't. However, our biggest individual offenders come from the front end, even if the cashiers generally don't steal as often as the rest of the store. They steal the largest amounts when they steal and it's not close. And we figure it out quickly, then we decide to shit can them or wait until they leave in handcuffs. But even then, most of our front end shrink IS NOT theft. We need the data where you are treated like a criminal to see which of our employees got scammed, which is the majority of front end shrink, and then train them better. Nobody pays attention to storewide scam trainings. Well some do. But some don't. But everyone pays attention when it's personal. Short changing, counterfeit bills, coupons, gift card scams, employees roping in other employees to their stuff, that's why it's important. We had to fire our entire pharmacy department because one of the techs was stealing pills. Why? Because the pharmacists gave the techs printouts of their approval code so the pharmacist didn't have to stop what she was doing and log in to the computer. So the pharmacists were technically dispensing these pills that got stolen. The tech was stealing them, but since she used everyone's login but her own, and both she and the pharmacist, in an effort to get themselves out of trouble, claimed the whole department was in on it, with EVIDENCE because of their logins showing the transaction, we had to fire everyone. There was one guy who was never in the building for any of it, was part time and not well liked by the others, who we weren't going to fire, but since he took part in the document falsification involved in the pharmacist giving him her login, he couldn't legally work in the pharmacy anymore and the union said they would fight his reclassification. So we had to fire him. Anyway, if any one of those pharmacy techs had just logged in as himself and gotten pharmacist approval as laid out by the law and store policy, they would still have jobs. So it is as much protecting jobs as it is firing people. EDIT: in my company's POS system cashiers were absolutely allowed to make random coupons. You just needed to know the PLU for it. But we tracked those PLUs and loss prevention did look at them. And any cashier could use them. We empowered our employees to essentially do whatever they wanted. They could change prices, make up coupons, all that shit. They're pretty much given complete freedom. Usually they don't have to ask the manager and just do it because they don't want to get interrogated later. I get it, but it's actually against store policy as it's annoying to the customer. If you have a problem under say, $15, the cashier should just fix it.