Research & Trends: Where Is POS Going?

By Lee Holman, IHL Group

Here's a bulleted list that recaps where the POS industry has come from and where we go from here.

• We saw the shipment growth curve change from a fairly constant 4% to 5% uptick each year to one with a more sinusoidal look due to massive POS rollouts for the convenience store segment (from the remodels related to federal requirements for in-ground tank replacement) and other retailers (from Y2K). We saw so many POS units shipped during a fairly short two- to three-year period that it suddenly became tough to find POS units that were older than the cashiers that operated them.