The Aloha point-of-sale system | Hacker News Reader

The Aloha point-of-sale system

tedium.co

47 pointspanic33 comments

Kind of an odd article. There's a lot of POS systems out there, and Aloha isn't be best, or the most popular, or the most innovative, or the newest, or the first. There's a lot of competition in the space, but no context is given. It's just... "Hey, did you know POS software is a thing? Well it is! And one of them is called Aloha. The reason Aloha is so great is that it's AMAZING! Did you know Aloha is made by a company that once employed Thomas Watson?!"

Feels more like a corporate press release than anything trying to inform people.

(That being said, I work for a company that integrates with Aloha, among many of their competitors, so maybe I'm not the target audience here.)

I agree. I thought the article was interesting but it felt unfinished.

yes there is indeed like a bajillion of POS systems. I'm the founder of one of them https://www.waiterio.com

I found ridiculous how there is a bajillion and everyone is claiming to be the LEADER IN THE INDUSTRY or 1# POS SYSTEM

It's a big market, there are a lot of restaurants and there is space for a lot of software. As far as I experienced there isn't a lot of virality in growth due to referalls since it's a B2B so no winner takes all happened (despite what some POS would like to make you believe).

I'm not in the service industry and I've seen it in enough places to have noticed it. I couldn't tell you the name of any other POS system (though the aloha bouncy screensaver is particularly notable)

It’s fairly ingrained.

NCRs market share especially among chain QSRs and FSRs is fairly dominant if they were founded 15+ years ago. Easy to configure but hard to do complicated things (No well supported places to integrate, requires a partnership which NCR doesn’t give easily). They fell behind in implementation speed compared to other vendors and were slow to market with effective online ordering integrations and chip card acceptance.

In some ways they are a victim of their own success. Small business owners in a tight margin industry aren’t ones to upgrade hardware and software when what they have works. Further the state and configuration is complex and maintained in multiple locations making upgrades challenging for those not using systems. When I was using it they’d done a big overall switch from version 6.7 which was a release that wouldn’t die 7.0 but there were ongoing issues with the new version that held us back from upgrading for a long time (thinking promo rounding rules and inventory calculations downstream). The upgrade hesitancy makes it hard to get the needed integrations.

Now NBO (formerly MenuLink) is hot garbage. And don’t even get me started on Configuration Center (CFC) or Command Center...

Trying to get hundreds of franchises to agree in an interface change is a special circle of hell. The only thing wise is converting to a new POS system.

I administered and did integrations for a large chain (1000+ stores from 2013 to 2016).

Aloha has the advantage of not being "cloud-hosted". You know, the ones where you stand in line at checkout waiting while the terminal talks to some overloaded server far away? That's modern "cloud" point of sale. Aloha has a little box under the manager's desk running the terminals.

Founder of one of those cloud-hosted POS https://www.waiterio.com Yes having no internet or slow internet with a cloud hosted POS is big trouble.

I foresee the cycle of innovation will be: 1) offline (PAST) 2) cloud-hosted (PRESENT) 3) cloud hosted but with full offline support (FUTURE) This way we'll have the best of both worlds.

What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily. So you are not stuck with the same system with 90s UIs.

Also by upgrading faster and being connected to the internet the POS is able to interface with external systems. Currently 99% of restaurants use a separate tablet for each online delivery service (deliveroo justeat foodpanda...).

> What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily.

This doesn't require "cloud" at all, just network connectivity. Software auto-updaters are no more complicated than zero-downtime cloud deployments. Especially in fully controlled environments where issues of users randomly switching off autoupdates or blocking Internet connectivity are probably nearly non-existent.

I'd argue that the software is more resilient if it runs locally. One can argue that cloud can be updated "in realtime" but live code updates had existed since forever (at least since eighties, with Erlang/OTP), and running locally makes things robust against network outages (or degradation) - which is probably way more frequent issue than getting the latest updates immediately.

Nobody wants to update a POS system "in realtime" - meaning while someone is actively using it and processing transactions. Just like nobody wants prices of items to change mid-transaction. It is impossible to explain these kinds of events to customers (sorry, but five of your eight Cokes are 20 cents more because we happened to be too slow to scan them and a price change came in between). In countries employing strict fiscal rules governing electronic cash registers - which are more and more on a global scale - stuff like that may even be illegal to do.

This is one of the reasons why that entire "cloud" SaaS thing is a bad fit for PoS systems to start with. It doesn't stop cloud apologetes to still develop and market such systems and customers who drank the cloud kool-aid to buy them, but what people actually want in that business when push comes to shove is a locally-installed system that is seamlessly offline-capable in all its core features, can send transactions out and receive new master data in real-time while network connectivity is available and can be updated easily and ideally via a centrally controllable and plannable process. And that have actually been bog-standard features for PoS systems for at least a decade or two, long before all that "push everything into the cloud" hype started.

Often the cloud sell is less a sale of “the cloud” and more modern development and configuration practices such as being able to do a reliable auto update. I’ve had a lot of vendors sell hosted solutions with the premise that since they will deploy an update regardless of the customers input it prevents the risk adverse business side from preventing updates.

It does provide resilience but it also increases the complexity which may not be the right trade off in some instances.

>What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily. So you are not stuck with the same system with 90s UIs.

How are constant UI changes a good thing?

I work on a POS system at "a big software company" and a primary selling point is that your transactions flow up from the POS, to an optional in-store server, to the cloud, and if any point experiences a temporary failure (POS -> in-store or in-store -> cloud) it will simply batch-upload at the next opportunity, seamlessly, with no impact on the cashier's experience.

Growing up and living near Dayton, Ohio, I just take for granted that most people know about NCR (National Cash Register), and the people associated with the company.

NCR was involved in work to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, building on the work done at Bletchley Park (which built on Polish work before the war)[1]. As time has passed and the secrecy associated with the work has been lifted there have been a number of interesting stories about locals (or their parents / grandparents) who worked on the project.

Wi-Fi arguably owes its existence to WaveLAN[2], developed by an NCR subsidiary in the late 1980's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Computing_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveLAN

One interesting point in the article is that Thomas Watson worked for NCR and was eventually fired. He went on to help build IBM.

I'd like to plug this wholesome POS that's not just full of features but also free to use http://keyhut.com/pos.htm

This kind of looks like the POS that Fry's uses. Always found it fascinating that they used a terminal-based app in like the 2000s

Yep, that's the first thing I thought. The system that seems to require 100 keystrokes to do a price match.

I’ve used many point of sale systems, and in my experience, POS usually stands for three other words.

I found Aloha great in some respects (usability on the floor) and poor in others (inventory control). Haven’t found a perfect system yet!

As someone who has no experience in POS systems at all (other than using them as a customer I suppose) what are your pain points with them? What would you change/add/remove?

"often still looking like it was designed in 1998"

Apparently that's not a blocker, since Toast, built in the last few years, looks almost exactly the same: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iKMT21ZfDyp...

that looks far sleeker and more modern that what I see used 99% of the time (no idea of it's aloha or something similar looking)

Is this even a bad thing?

The users of this software are "professional" - they interact with it anywhere from dozens of times a day to literally their entire shift. As such, the primary UX concerns are going to be speed and accuracy. Though having lots of buttons doesn't fit the slick/minimalist styling a lot of current apps go for, it's undoubtedly faster to use and easier to learn.

I'd expect the most common operations to take 1 or 2 interactions (presses), and the least common shouldn't take more than 3 or 4. It should also be easily discoverable, From just looking at the screenshot, and having almost no experience with PoS, I'm pretty confident I could use it immediately with no training and actually place an order for someone.

That said, Aloha in particular could probably benefit from some tweaking by a graphic designer - even just some minor changes to the color palette, spacing and border styles could make it much more visually appealing, without losing the current UX.

> I'm pretty confident I could use it immediately with no training and actually place an order for someone.

From experience I can tell you right now that POS software (officially stands for "point of sale", but in my mind most of them actually mean something else) violates pretty much every single expectation and convention you'd find in desktop software UIs.

In fact, I'd argue it's easier for someone who's never been exposed to computers to learn it than for an experienced computer user, as the novice would learn from scratch while the experienced user would expect the POS to behave like most desktop computer software which usually isn't the case.

I think part of the problem is that most POS software is designed to replicate a physical machine which has physical constraints such as a fixed number of buttons and small display area. In contrast, a computer can display anything and rearrange its UI depending on the context. Example: most POS software has a specific way (usually a button) to put an order on hold and be able to start ringing up the next customer's items while the existing order is invisible in the background, because on a physical POS there's no way to just duplicate the keyboard and screen and become two POSes side by side. On a computer however, the same is trivial by just having 2 tabs, both with the POS UI but containing the different orders. Most people would immediately recognise and understand (because of prior experience with browser tabs) without a need for training

And most people would be irritated and ring stuff up into the wrong "tab" multiple times a day, because people are bad at multitasking.

There is a reason why most POS software is intentionally restrictive and violating many common UI imperatives. Many common UI design rules are not governing the case of a user who is specifically trained to use a certain system, but must then use it in stressful situations at maximum speed and minimum error rate.

Has anyone encountered/used a good open source POS system? The most promising one I found in a quick search was https://github.com/opensourcepos/opensourcepos

My first restaurant job used Aloha. I loved Aloha. It did everything I needed it to do. I worked front of house on the floor and it was great. I worked back of house and it was great. I worked bar and it was great. THEN! We were bought by Darden and had to use their in-house system. It was hot garbage compared to Aloha.

I worked on that, jesus fucking christ the amount of shit that i've seen

Like what? Just curious

30 years of undocumented legacy code, we had to reverse engineer the binary ouput to interact with it.

Also all cloud additional services run trougth a zip that it produces at the end of the day with a full snapshot of the restaurant that day. From 5 to 30 MB a zip, a day, for 500K restaurant. We were moving TERABYTES over SMB

I’d love to hear stories! I used it in many restaurants between about 2001-2013, and have to say besides probably less than 3 outages, I never noticed a single issue due to software (how it was set up by mgmt is another issue but never got in the way that much). Probably the worst problem was with touch screen calibration, but even having to touch an inch down and to the left of what I needed, I could still fly through the UI.

I remember designing my own POS/inventory tracking concepts, and thinking back on it, knowing what I know now after about the same amount of time as a professional developer as I spent in restaurants, I’m impressed with how well it performed IME.

So for all the pain I’m sure you felt, still, hats off to you!

It's great for front of house staff but the inventory control/back of house feature set is extremely limited (disclaimer: I moved off of using Aloha day to day in 2016).

One story that comes to mind is the difficulty of change management. It’s possible to configure Aloha locally but beyond a certain number of locations a configuration tool called Configuration Center is used. It basically stores configuration information on a server (as a tree with the rough idea of inheritance) that stores connect to and pull down into the various configuration formats used.

In the tool there isn’t a concept of approvals. We had an admin disable receipt printers at all stores. There wasn’t a reliable global refresh so we had 10 people logging in remotely (through another horrible tool that was a front end for a reverse VNC connection) and calling stores to reset their configuration which brought their system down for 2 to 10 minutes during a Friday lunch rush.

We fixed this with process but NCR made it easy to shoot oneself in the foot.

So that's what they call this software.I think I've seen it at least in every second establishment out there.

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