The Evolution and De-Evolution of the Staples’ Register System

Back in the caveman days of my employment with Staples, the register system was an old monochrome one-piece unit I believe that was a CASIO brand.  These units were somewhat loud and generated heat.  A lot of heat.  In fact one day, the register I had been working on had its display start shrinking on the right hand side slowly throughout the day and by the time I returned from lunch, it had smoke coming out of the back of the unit.  The cashier who was covering my break didn’t even realize that the register was creating a thick black cloud of smoke from its backside.

Safety hazards aside, the register system was extremely primitive, especially when compared to the last register system I used at Woolworth.  In fact, these machines reminded me more of the type of monochrome computers that I had used back in the early ‘80s in high school.  Certainly not state of the art by any means.

Back when I started with the company, it was required to ask every customer if they had either a “Dividends Card or a Tax-Exempt Card”.  The reason this was asked at the very beginning was that these cards had to be processed before ANY item got rung into the register.  Sometimes, it could take a customer as long as 10 minutes or longer to search for a card that didn’t exist.  Sometimes, after a customer said “never mind”, they found the card, but it was too late to process.  After about 3 weeks of absolute boredom and sarcasm regarding the tax-exempt card, I decided to stop asking for it as I figured that less than 5% of customers actually had one.  Over the course of the next few weeks, other cashiers followed my lead and stopped asking for it as well. 

To look up the Dividends card in this system, the cashier could only look up by phone number and sadly mostly local ones at that.  Because of the way the system operated, each register had to have the entire card file downloaded into the register or be triggered by having the customer physically have their card with them.  It was very common to have a register not have the customer’s card info and have it readily available in another.  It was figured that the information was updated just a couple of times a week at best.

This awful system lasted for about 3 years until finally we entered the modern era (or is that error).  The company finally got new registers.  These new registers manufactured by Fujitsu were much more advanced than the previous registers.  Such advancements included having the ability to input the Dividends card or tax-exempt card anytime in a transaction.  With these new registers came new problems, however. 

Amongst the problems included the occasional locking up of the register at random times.  With the old register system, the register would normally lock up after entering 100 items in one transaction.  The new system wasn’t so forgiving as you could be ringing up a transaction then all of a sudden the entire screen would just go blank.  The plus side to all this frustration is that the entire system was a touchscreen system, yet it still had poor reaction at times.

What made the register system worse is that the entire register was web-based, so that it could also be doubled as a time clock, or a Staples.com terminal, or an inventory control screen.  However, the more functions opened up, the more unstable the register became.  It was not surprising to restart a machine at least once an hour just because of how it was running.  Sometimes, it was a very frustrating system.  I will have much more to say in future posts. 

As far the tax-exemption goes, this will be the discussion of my next post.  Certainly not a fun process no matter which company I worked for.

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