First, the bad news—and “news” is definitely a stretch here: The restaurant point-of-sale is dead.
In the restaurant industry, business has been shifting away from the POS for years. Today, three-fourths of all orders are for to-go, according to recent data from the National Restaurant Association. In the process, that box on the counter has lost its role as the central clearinghouse for restaurant transactions.
“The point of sale is really a tentacle,” Krystle Mobayeni, head of restaurants for payments processor Fiserv, said during the National Restaurant Association Show last week. “It’s a channel. It is not the central operating system.”
She agreed with the contention that the POS, as we once knew it, has gone belly-up.
And now for the good news: In this case, there is life after death. The restaurant POS, finally free from its mortal coil on the counter, is beginning an expansive second life, one that centers on hospitality and intelligence rather than simply processing transactions.
Mobayeni was at the show in part to help promote a new product from Fiserv called Clover Hospitality by BentoBox. It is being marketed as a POS for upscale restaurants, but Mobayeni thinks of it as a commerce platform. If she could have gotten away with calling it that commercially, she would have.
“It’s doing the function of on-premise, and people know what that is instead of calling it an omni-commerce platform,” she said. But, “we’re not trying to create a different language right now.”
Fiserv acquired Mobayeni’s BentoBox in 2021, and its online ordering and marketing software form the foundation of the new Clover Hospitality. But the system’s most interesting innovations are actually on the on-premise side—the stuff that traditionally falls under the purview of the POS.
Historically, Mobayeni said, the POS has been a back-of-house, operations-focused tool. With Clover Hospitality, she wanted to reimagine it as customer-facing. “When you think of the diner as an actual stakeholder, how does that change the [POS] experience?” she said.
That approach resulted in Clover Hospitality’s most notable innovation: a feature that allows customers to enter their payment information when they make a reservation, keep track of their bill as their meal unfolds, and leave whenever they want. Their card is then automatically charged, much like in a hotel or an Uber. Called checkless payments, it is designed to eliminate the time-consuming and sometimes awkward transaction that can sour the end of an otherwise great meal.
That in and of itself is a new way of thinking about how the POS functions. And it could eventually evolve beyond payments to other parts of the meal experience. Because checkless payment ties reservations to customers’ purchase history, the restaurant could message a returning guest and ask whether they’d like the same wine they ordered last time, and even begin decanting it before they arrive.
It could also help ease the end-of-meal experience by incorporating services like coat check or valet parking to make the exit even more seamless.
“A point-of-sale is so transactional, but what this system is going to become is more than that,” said Sean Feeney, head of Grovehouse Hospitality, who was part of a brain trust of restaurateurs that helped Fiserv develop the new technology. “It is a point-of-sale from the beginning when someone enters the reservation until after they leave. We’re creating a new ecosystem for that experience.”
Square's new handheld puts the POS in servers' pocket. | Photo by Joe Guszkowski
Becoming more omnichannel is a natural development for the POS as more customers engage with restaurants through digital channels. But the POS is also evolving on the operations side.
“I think point of sale is really extending itself in different fashions,” said Ming Tai-Huh, head of food and beverage for POS provider Square, during the show. “Sometimes into the management and staff experience and then also into the consumer experience as well.”
With a simple demonstration, Tai-Huh showed how mobile devices have allowed the POS to be almost anywhere for restaurateurs. He pulled out his phone and opened his Square Dashboard app, which he uses in his side gig as the owner of Amba Cafe, a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The app showed him all sorts of real-time data on the restaurant’s sales and transactions for the day.
“In the early days … you had to be literally in the back office to do work, and that’s obviously not the case now,” he said. “I can basically run the entire business from this device.”
He scrolled through Amba’s performance data on his phone, in Chicago, nearly 1,000 miles away from the restaurant in Cambridge. “Let’s see here, how am I doing today?” he said. “Oh, I’m killing it.”
The same principle applies to Square’s big new product release, handheld devices for servers, which its PR materials describe as “a powerful and pocketable point of sale.” The idea is to free waitstaff from having to travel to and from the countertop POS so they can spend more time helping customers.
Tai-Huh shared an anecdote about the owner of Polly’s Cafe in Brooklyn, who has been using the handheld to take orders from customers who are waiting in line during the morning rush. She has enjoyed being able to talk to people on their level, rather than across a counter.
“She doesn’t want her business just to be a transaction machine without any soul,” he said.
Bryan Solar, chief product officer for POS provider SpotOn, has seen a similar shift in the POS from a primarily transactional device to something more all-encompassing. He now thinks of SpotOn not as a POS but as a “restaurant management system.”
“What I think that that means is, it is our job not just to tell you what you sold yesterday, but to tell you how to become more profitable tomorrow,” he said.
One of SpotOn’s new features, Profit Assist, is an example of that philosophy. The AI-powered tool integrates with restaurants’ accounting software, looks for anomalies and generates action items that can help restaurants save money. It looks both backwards and forwards, rather than just into the past. It is saving restaurants an average of more than 4% in total costs, he said.
“I think the scenario wherein we are not allowed to sit on our laurels and be like, ‘Hey, you sold 15 fish yesterday,’ I think that’s going to benefit restaurants a lot.”
The POS may have come to an end of sorts on the counter. But in its reincarnated form, it seems to be just getting started.