Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Blue Bottle Coffee switches to Square there was a noticeable decline in the throughput at the cash register. It just takes the retail employee longer to do anything on an iPad. Pretty much everything can be done faster on a real cash register. There have also been the requisite outages, of course. Recently I was at Blue Bottle and the Square terminal wasn't opening the cash drawer. They were making change out of…
There's something that a lot of retailers don't get - never put an obstacle in front of the customer giving you their money. Don't let lines form at checkouts. Don't clog up the counter with impulse-purchase stuff. Don't put displays in the path of customers headed for checkout. Don't make customers jump through hoops with loyalty cards and data entry. Don't do anything that slows the checkout process. There are expe…
Ironically, I think "open" stores (like an Apple store) exhibit the same behavior. Even though there's technically no labyrinth to navigate through, good luck finding an efficient way to purchase a product, especially if it's just a small one. You first signal an Apple checkout fairy to grace you with her checkout wand, so that someone else can find you and swipe your card. If your purchase is small, they hardly even give you time of day. So stupid.
And the analogy can be extended to online stores too. Any store with a "just add this too" in the checkout experience invokes the same negative reaction. Though I am a heavy Amazon customer, their checkout process is just barely tolerable in this way. And think about GoDaddy and how miserably awful their checkout experience has been (and continues to be) throughout the years.