Growth Of Kiosks In Retail

By Keith McNamara, Acuative

Kiosk and kiosk applications have truly hit their stride in retail. Many different retailers and companies are using touch screen kiosks to perform many functions. In stores, we see self-checkout, coin counting, video rental, photo processing, and in-store hiring kiosk applications, and the list continues to expand.

Introduction of new technology is the standard in retail. Retailers have implemented scanning, wireless networking, handheld devices, wide area networking, and many other applications and kiosk devices. They do it because these technologies increase in-store productivity. But with the plethora of these technologies comes the requirement to support, maintain, update, and upgrade these technologies. Much has been written about total cost of ownership (TCO), and most retailers do have their arms around the real cost and the real benefit of deploying these tools.