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It seems like it would have been easy to use as a battery-powered POS terminal, with just some simple BASIC software. That might not have been sufficiently better than a mechanical cash register or a carbonless-copy receipt pad though to justify it.

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You'd think so, but I can't find anyone had actually been using it as such. Since it can read and write tapes, it seems it would be perfectly suited to running a retail store's day to day business. The barcode scanner and some basic database software would have probably sold like hotcakes as a portable POS system.

The printer is very slow, one line at a time. It would not be great as a POS terminal, but it could connect to a serial printer over RS-232 and external disks and a screen via the other TTL-level 36400 bps port.

Were there barcode scanners that were efficient enough to be battery-operated in 1981?

Looks like there was one you had to swipe over the barcode, likely just a single CCD type device https://computarium.lcd.lu/photos/albums/EPSON_HX20/album/sl...

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