The Early Days of Businesses And History of Point of Sale Systems

Historically, point of sales systems had their roots in 1870’s in Dayton, Ohio. The business of James Ritty named as “Dealer of pure whiskies, fine wines and cigars” was successful. However, like other business in that period, this entrepreneur was faced with raising issue related with employees that cannot help stealing from the cash drawer. The employees fraud the money received from the customers instead of depositing them.

When James Ritty was on the steamboat trip to Europe, he was intrigued by wok of mechanical device on the ship propeller that counts the number of revolutions for maintenance purposes. Once he came home to Dayton, James and his brother started to develop their idea to duplicate the mechanism and to design it in way to count cash transactions at the saloon. In 1879, James and his brother patented their invention as “Ritty’s incorruptible cashier”, nowadays well known as cash register.

Afterwards, Ritty brothers opened a factory for manufacturing these cashiers. Jacob Eckert bought the business from Ritty’s in 1881, and named it as “National manufacturing company”. Later, he sold the business to John Patterson who continues making improvements and he applied paper roll to the cash register for recording the day transactions.
In the next years, the cash registers continued to be improved, and in 1970’s the first computer driven cash register were introduced.

In the 1980’s the retail software based on PC technology started to make its way into mainstream retail entrepreneurship. Nowadays, POS systems are based on advanced technology, they are more secure and they could provide useful information by allowing the user to operate in functional integrated system.

The Rise of Point of Sale Systems

It was the IBM who rolled out the first point of sale systems in the early 1970’s. This early machines do have a simple terminals connected to a to a mainframe controller. The controller does all of the processing. The terminals just serve as a display screen and don’t have any processing power at all. This marked the transition of businesses to computer based monitoring systems. The Pathmark supermarket stores in New York and New Jersey and the Dillards department stores in California were the first ones to use these machines. However, as of that time, many businesses still rely heavily on cash registers and electronic cash registers to process their business transactions. It was no different than a calculator and electronic typewriter combined.

Then, on 1990’s, with increase of personal computers, the idea of automating the process of retail systems began. This time is also when computer hardware began capable of using GUI, along with the rise of Windows and Apple.

Today, retail point of sale systems are light years ahead of where they began. Today’s POS systems are faster, more secure, and more reliable than their predecessors, and allow retailers to operate every facet of their business with a single, integrated point of sale system.

Affordable Point of Sale Systems

However, we know that a point of sale system can cost you thousands of dollars, albeit the need for additional software, hardware, updates and other add-ons. Overall, a complete point of sale system can cost you nearly $5,000 per unit. But what if you need more than one unit? For an average sized restaurant, $20,000 alone is needed to deploy four units of point of sale system; database and backend support might have additional charges.

What if we tell you, that we offer point of sale system at $75? Well, it is not really $75 but $75 each month, lease to own! And it comes with free installation, training, delivery and tech support which you’ll have to pay for about $100 each hour from other POS vendors. Simply fill out our lease form to get started or you call us at 1-888-405-8706 to learn more about our products and services.