Coffee chain brews up POS hardware

To demonstrate the ruggedness of IBM’s point-of-sale gear, sales executives held display screens under running water. Steven Bolduc, senior manager of POS and technical support at Caribou Coffee Company in Minneapolis, was impressed.

"For a coffee company, that's big," Bolduc says. Spills are unavoidable in Caribou's 400 retail coffee shops, and the IT gear has to be able to withstand frequent dousing. Size is also a concern: Some of the retail stores are small, and service devices have to do double duty as managers' workstations for handling operational and reporting tasks.

After researching its options, Caribou settled on IBM's SurePOS 500 terminals and IBM Anyplace Kiosk units, both of which run Windows XP. The new SurePOS 500 terminals are for employees to take orders and payments. In prep areas, the Anyplace Kiosk units are Caribou's kitchen video units, displaying customer orders waiting to be filled.

Caribou has used POS hardware from IBM since its first stores opened in 1992. Bolduc continually swaps out older gear for newer, often repurposing the older devices. "There's always some sort of turnover," he says. "When I get a new terminal, I try to change the other hardware to a different area and get some more life out of it."

The SurePOS 500 terminals Bolduc is rolling out today have touchscreen displays and enough processing power and memory to eliminate the need for a separate back-office server. If a network connection is lost - the stores are linked to corporate headquarters via T-1, DSL or 56K frame connections, depending on service availability - the SurePOS terminals can continue handling customer transactions.

Expandability was a key factor in the selection. "It has to have enough power to last, and it has to have enough ports for us to add special things," Bolduc says. For example, Caribou is working on adding labels to its cups, so the terminal may have to support a label printer. The company also is considering adding bar codes to some of its retail items, so a bar code reader could be added to the setup. "All these peripherals have to be able to attach to that system," Bolduc says.