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It also very much changes perceptions. I used to work for a company that manufactured point of sale systems. They found they could improve the amount of time th
by vitd 10y ago
It also very much changes perceptions. I used to work for a company that manufactured point of sale systems. They found they could improve the amount of time the customer waited by queueing up all the printing of the receipt until the end of the transaction. (This was in the 1980s.) They could save something like 10-20 seconds per customer, which meant they could move 1-2 additional people per checkout per day. (And the store had something like 10-20 registers - it was a huge store.)
However, customers hated it because it felt like it took longer. They would be done with their transaction, done paying, then have to way 10-20 seconds for their receipt to finish printing. So they'd be standing there just waiting to leave with nothing to do. The company had us change it back to printing each line as it was entered into the computer.
- mixmastamyk 10y agoHow could printing at the end take less time than printing as you go?
- brazzledazzle 10y agoI'm wondering as well. Perhaps the overall impact of needing to tear and reprint when there's an error that needs to be corrected?
- chiph 10y agoBecause it serializes the operation, whereas printing as you go operates in parallel. But the modern thermal receipt printers are pretty fast (the old dot-matrix ones weren't). Epson has one that does 350 mm/sec (13.75 inches per second). So as long as you aren't shopping at CVS with their infamously long receipts, it's not too long of a wait.