Hacker News Reader

India's informal "shadow" economy makes up nearly 40% of GDP. There are clear advantages to maintaining proper books, such as improved planning and better access to credit. But do you think the smaller merchants this tool is designed to help will want to move into the formal economy and accept the responsibilities-- namely higher taxes-- that go alongside this? Or is tax evasion generally not an issue among smaller merchants in India?

> Or is tax evasion generally not an issue among smaller merchants in India?

I've read income tax evasion is nearly endemic there, but don't know how reliable that was. In retail the more likely problem is avoiding collecting sales taxes etc, but India has a goods and services tax which means most of that is baked in by the time you hit retail.

> This product basically enables me to do what I already do as a shopkeeper and maintain existing efficiencies while I also have the opportunity to digitize my transactions. I think it could be a game-changer.

Perhaps a stupid question on my part, but I wonder whether it'll really help you "maintain existing efficiencies". I'd imagine that a classical calculator-based workflow has efficiencies of the following kind:

- Approximately zero latency on I/O. Whether it's adding a digit or performing a calculation, screen updates instantly. This is something no smart device I've ever seen offers, because modern tech stacks make it near-impossible to achieve.

- Optimized for speed. Beyond no latency, this also means error-tolerant workflow. You can feel when you make a mistake, and it's easy to nuke the entire calculation you're doing and re-do it again. On the product site, I couldn't find a video showing how it's actually used, but going by the diagrams alone, Tohands seems to be effectively committing every time you press the "=" button. That feels like adding a pain in either having to undo things, or having to be super careful.

Please tell me if I'm wrong about the product, or the calculator-based workflow. I didn't work in retail, but I did observe people doing calculator-based retail and accounting in the past.

Super interesting. I think you are right. The whole play is about latency. How quickly can I get in and out is the only calculus in the minds of most retail customers in this segment. Like my mom would send me to the store to buy ingredients while she is literally cooking because she ran out of something, and I would need to be in and out in <4 minutes (including travel time)!

I agree that the calculator is literally in every one of these stores because of zero latency. The design question is how can you build something that has greater digitization and data storage capabilities (and I/O to connect to payments/phones) while keeping latency as low or close to a calculator. I'm just saying this comes close, where every other $100MM VC funded play wants to add significant latency to the design and thus have seen much lower adoption.

From the video it looks like you use the dedicated "cash in" or "cash out" buttons to commit.

The latency is not clear from the demo videos, but there's no reason why the device couldn't sync with the cloud in the background. It's probably fine if cloud syncing is not done in real-time, which leaves plenty of time to provide an instant response. I'm sure this is something the engineers thought about, considering they seem to know their target market well.

"The elegance of the Kirana sale/checkout is efficiency - no barcodes to scan, no POS to deal with, and it's probably 3-4x faster than any modern checkout process. However, there is one tool they always use - a calculator."

As someone that has worked a cash register both with barcodes and scanning, and doing the same thing with a calculator when power/computers crashed, I don't know how you can say a calculator is more efficient than a proper POS.

Labour efficient? Time efficient? Tax avoidance efficient?

Does this unorganized corner of economy really need to be digitalized?

I assume that it is organized well enough, maybe just not in a conventional western way.