Touch screens started to gain a lot of momentum in the 90’s as restaurants PC based point of sale systems became more and more common. With the growing stability of Microsoft Windows in 1995, Visual Retail Plus was the pioneer to enter the retail point of sale with a screen touch. Many questions were raised about the need, and those who couldn’t see the future, were stuck with the limited DOS function keys to perform the most complicated tasks. Remember the Alt-Shift-C for “Cash” or the CTRL-X to exit the screen? Today we can only laugh how primitive we were. The following big thing in retail point of sale was the mouse. With the endless jokes about IBM’s instructions “How to replace the mouse ball” we learned very quickly, that the precious retail counter space should be used for wrapping, and signing the credit card slips. The mice were the first to malfunction, and the obvious solution was the screen touch. The manufacturers came up with three main types: Capacitive, Resistive and Infra-Red. Each with its advantages and disadvantages in terms of preciseness, reliability and response time, and we ended up with the almost one and only in production today for retail – the capacitive.

Aging population of cashiers have hard time adopting to use of mouse, tight space on the receiving desk limits the mouse work, and working as a cashier standing us is almost an impossible position for mouse operation. A screen with tilt capabilities and responsive screen touch is easy to use, durable, and intuitive. The checkout process has to be fast and hassle free, and the touch screen provides a good support for it. With no need for a 19 inches keyboard and a full square foot mouse pad, the operation is smooth, fast and elegant. Combined with advanced retail point of sale system such as visual Retail Plus, where the on-screen program is built specifically for a touch screen, enhances the operator experience. Training cashiers taught us over the years, that learning how to use a system designed for a touch screen with visual effects, diminishes the learning time to a fraction of what we had with a keyboard and later on a mouse.

Regardless of the actual physical size of the screen, properly designed software will make sure that the buttons at the point of sale are square and not having the traditional rectangle shape, and that the fonts on the buttons are big enough for all type of vision levels and the general design supports both righty and lefty users. The “close window” is a big button and not the tiny “X” on the top right.

There is no maintenance needed for a screen touch, some older models may need calibration upon installation or screen resolution change, but all in all, it’s a trouble free devise with no foreseen disadvantage.

With the very low price for the added screen touch, and while users are so used to a touch screen on their mobile device and I-pads (and similar devices), the most natural and logical step towards cashier’s good experience is a touch screen.