The cash register was not invented for the convenience of the customer. It was originally designed to stop employees embezzling money from their employers by alerting them to the fact that a sale was being processed. Two American inventors, James Ritty and John Birch patented it in 1883.
The first register model was like a mechanical adding machine. As every transaction was entered, the drawer opened and a bell rang, telling the manager a sale had taken place. The machine used metal taps marked with denominations to indicate the amount of the sale and had a total adder that summed up all the cash values of the key pressed during the day. Advertisements claimed that the register had “The Bell Heard Round The World”.
Ritty sold his invention to Jacob H. Eckert of Cincinnati, who formed the National Manufacturing Company. Eckert then sold to John H. Patterson, who renamed the company the National Cash Register Company. It was Patterson who adapted the design to add a paper roll to record sales transactions, thus creating a receipt.
It was then down to the employees of the National Cash Register Company to come up with the next advancement. Inventor, Charles Kettering, designed a cash register with an electric motor. By the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, nearly all retailers had installed cash registers.
In the UK, from the 1950s to the 1970s it was the Gross Cash Registers Company that captured a large share of the retail market. In 1971, when the UK changed to decimalization, the Gross Register was adapted to work in both imperial and decimal coinage. Another brand, Sweda, was also ‘decimal ready’ and is credited with inventing the first all-mechanical register in the 1930s. It was also the first company to introduce touch-screen based point-of-sale (POS) systems, in 1987.
Today, computerized POS terminals operate across networks. The basic principles remain the same, however, the cash register allows the retailer to keep tabs on what staff and customers are doing and to analyze the information for business, stock control, supply chain and marketing purposes.
Furthermore, the tablet device has created a mobile sales, transaction and check-out opportunity that brings the “old” cash register to consumers wherever they are in the store. And some restaurant chains are now using the tablet for ordering and payment as well.
Contribution to Retail History
From its initial role as a method by which retailers could verify sales and receipts and reduce fraud, continual innovation has extended the influence of the cash register across broader cash management systems. Equipped with barcode scanning capabilities and now with self-scanning, it is fundamental to the development and management of modern sales data, management information retrieval and storage.