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The majority of retail sales is low-margin, so I can guarantee you that those businesses watch their numbers like a hawk. They break it down by time, user, pro

• moron4hire 13y ago
  From the interviews that I've conducted with business owners in my neighborhood[1], they mostly have no clue what their businesses are doing in terms of efficiency. They know that the take from the till at the end of the day is more than they are spending every month. Some of them have been in business for a few decades, so they have an intuitive sense that the end-of-day sales should be X or else they suspect their cashier is robbing them, but ultimately they have no real metrics. They dump their POS data on their accountant every month and the accountant serves as a glorified Excel spreadsheet for them to generate a P&L statement. That's the sum total of analysis they do. As long as the tax man stays out of their business and the doors stay open, they don't care. But also, with the business owner friends that I've had, it can be a really isolating experience. When you're a business owner, you don't have a lot of peers. And you have to deal with a lot of bullshit artists, too. I see a lot of lack of trust. Sometimes, people put trust in expensive systems--a form of passing on responsibility. Sometimes, people are willing to take a chance if the chance is not expensive. A pub is a pub is a pub. It's about the markup on the drinks and wrangling the bullshit of the drink distributors' promotions. Customers expect Guinness on tap and Guinness distributors expect you to also take Harp from them, but customers don't want to drink Harp[2]. There isn't too much that you can customize in that environment. No, it's not a science, but there really should be a "currently best know configuration" for such a place that opinions to the contrary had better come with some rock solid evidence. At any rate, I want to build a cash register that Just Works, and let my experience help others make cash registers in their own vision. If someone thinks my cash register works for them, then they can take it. If they want something else, I hope there will be others available for them. I know that there is a type of business owner that would want what I'm making. That's enough of a start. [1] I've actually gone door to door interviewing strangers. I recount in vague terms my first experience here (http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/63292425072/keep-your-feet-on-the-ground http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/63292425072/keep-your-feet...), but there were many more after this that were equally informative. [2] paradoxically, Harp is a better lager than Guinness is a stout, but I digress.
  • doublerebel 13y ago
    Thanks for linking me to that post, good to hear about your groundwork! I would be interested to see what your business model is for incentivizing owners who currently do no (!) tracking. They are inherently cheap and taking a chance on $300-$500 in hardware may not look as attractive as the 'free' existing options that are bundled with payment processing. I think removing the upfront hardware cost by suggesting whatever touch device the owner has would make for much easier conversions. Sell them better hardware after trust is established. There are definitely foreign Android tablets for $100 which are fast enough for a simple browser POS. As for pubs, there absolutely is a science, and customization is a part of it. Rotating tap lists, happy hours, specialty drinks... but the tools to simplify and apply the science are mostly atrocious and unknown (just Google "bar cost calculator"). Bars done right have some of the better margins in retail though, so I think they could be worthwhile to target. As you can probably tell, I've thought long of doing this (ever since I redesigned the cost spreadsheet when managing my first bar.) I wish you the best in your venture! I'm subscribed to see how it turns out.
    • moron4hire 13y ago
      I'm not that far down the road. I suppose I should be. A lot of what I'm doing right now is about understanding the current market. That obviously terrible software can still exist and survive on its own in this space suggests that there is a fundamental disparity of information between vendor and business owner. I'm playing with some ideas for, once FOSS POS is an easily implementable thing, what would service providers look like around such an ecosystem. I think half the guys I knew in college had some form of IT consulting business on the side, computer setup, virus cleanup, etc. If FOSS POS could be made easy, maybe such people would have more ways to fund their tuition. What better way to help out small businesses than to make a way for them to easily find other small businesses in their area? I'm also considering a concept of commodetization of the data platform. With an Open Data attitude, and simple means to export and import data, then it would give a lot of users a lot of leverage against whomever is hosting their database. Maybe they host it on their own some day, too. Too many of the parts are not interchangeable. You can't easily put a support person into the situation who wasn't responsible for the initial installation. You can't ever leave the database you're on if you want to maintain your data history in a reasonable way. And if you want to add features, you're stuck. Unless you're big enough for your vendor to care about adding it for you, you're not going to get anywhere and you're not going to be able to get anyone else to come along and help you. There is so much data in these businesses that is going completely untapped. There are so many opportunities for analysis and insight, and they are mostly going overlooked because the system is viewed as a burden. Let's get rid of the burden and then see where we are.