Honest Weight Food Co-Op Opens New Facility

The Honest Weight Food Co-Op opened their brand new environmentally sustainable grocery store at 100 Watervliet Ave. in Albany, NY.

The new store offers an improved shopping experience for their member-owners and customers by providing a larger and more expansive store, greatly increased parking and expanded services and amenities.  The Co-Op also increased the number of checkouts to increase throughput and expand on their customer service.

Leadership In The Workplace

There are two types of leaders, those who can motivate people, and those whose motivation comes from within. When we try to motivate people, what we're really doing is encouraging people topresent ideas in a way that furthers the organization's mission. Encourage and applaud great ideas.

Open and maintain dialogue about critical areas. Allow idea sharing, both formal and informal. Conduct meetings in a formal presentation with detailed action plans. In addition, accept pitches via e-mail, and hold gatherings for brainstorming.

Don’t disparage bad ideas. When people are encouraged, great ideas will present themselves. It’s inevitable that there will good and bad ideas too. When starting a new project or assignment, even the most enthusiastic and conscientious employees need to understand your direction. To keep moving forward and keep people engaged, clarify results desired.

When people see clearly how certain actions will take them down their desired paths, they take action and make good decisions without hesitation, on their own, by drawing upon their internal stores of motivation.

Is Your POS System Ready For Summer?

Memorial Day is the unofficial start of the summer season.  Before the temperature hits the summer time high, you may want to take a few moments to go over this POS system maintenance checklist to make sure your POS system is ready to handle the summer holiday rushes and the summer heat.

UPS, especially the battery backup side of the UPS, is critical to keep your POS system running smoothly.  During summer seasons, power consumption is at its highest, increasing the chance of power interruption in the form of blackout or brownout.  Blackouts are easier to detect but brownouts may not be easily felt.  Power fluctuation could also cause power surges.  Any one of these power outage scenarios could damage your POS system, or any electronic devices that are not protected by a surge protector or UPS.  If you have a UPS and do not remember when it was installed or replaced, you should replace them.  You don’t want to wait until any part of your POS system sustains damage before you install or replace your UPS.

Your POS system is equipped with backup devices and media.  There may be automatic file backups but there is always a removable backup device and media in the form of external hard drives or DVD discs.  This should be your daily or weekly routine to make sure your system is backed up to the removable media, and the removable media is swapped out regularly.  This will allow for the quickest way to restore your system after a hard drive replacement.  Don’t learn the hard way, make having a removable backup part of your operational routine, just like counting cashiers and running reports.

All electronic equipment will have vents for cooling; make sure your POS equipment has room for cooling.  Look at the vents and make sure the vents are clear of dust and are not blocked.  Although your IBM POS systems are designed to withstand the toughest conditions in the retail environment, it is still a good practice to help keep your system running at peak performance.

These are just some of the regular maintenance practices that you should do to better prevent any system down time.  Your POS system is the mission critical part of your operation.  It pays to follow simple maintenance practices to ensure you and your POS systems have a great summer.  Contact an STCR Representative to discuss how the latest in retail hardened technology is achieving extended system life.

Is Your POS System Secure?

Security – it’s the buzz word these days and everyone wants to feel secure.  How secure is your grocery store?  Obviously it’s important to make your store secure from intruders, you probably have security systems to prevent intrusion and theft.   Beyond the physical security, do you know how secure your virtual security is? 

You should know that as a store operator, you are required to follow the PCI guidelines to protect the personal data of your customers.  One of the many things that you have to do is to make sure that your POS software and hardware is updated to the level that is compliant.  This is probably the most obvious step; however there are several other areas that you need to address.

If you have Internet connection, you are vulnerable to Internet intrusions such as virus, spyware, etc.  There are also more active ways that a hacker could gain access to your computer.  The challenge is to stay ahead of these intrusions.  For example, to secure your network a Firewall segregates your internal network from the public Internet.  It has an array of functions and features that protects your internal network as well as providing backup connections to the Internet.  Another option is to have a subscribed comprehensive network security service that bundles hardware, software, and monitoring service to actively protect your network.  Even with all the technology to protect your system, the best practice is to limit the Web access to business related traffic only. 

As your POS systems provider, we at STCR are here to provide the ever changing solution to help you stay up to date.  If you have question on whether your network is secure or if your POS software is up to date, please don’t hesitate to contact us.