Retailers don’t have time to deal with disruptions caused by common hazards. Reliability and durability are two important considerations when you’re investing in point-of-sale and self-service hardware. You, your employees, and your customers need your retail technology to work seamlessly with minimal downtime. That’s why it’s so important that your retail technology is retail hardened.
What does “retail-hardened” mean for retail businesses?
Retail-hardened technology is tough enough to endure years of demanding and unpredictable retail environments, and flexible enough to grow and evolve as your business does. It’s more than just physical toughness and the ability to survive an impact; your technology should be able to scale as well, from touchscreens and processors to PIN pads and printers. This way, you can evolve your store’s technology infrastructure as your business and customers’ needs change, instead of ripping and replacing with new devices every few years. We put our hardware through worst-case scenario performance testing – including fluid and chemical resistance tests, extreme temperature tests, and more – to ensure it works in the real ways that people use them.
Retail stores aren’t cubicles – so why would they use the same technology?
Not all hardware is created equally. It’s easy to customize generic office-grade or consumer-grade hardware and repackage it for a retail environment, but in the long term, that technology won’t deliver and withstand the performance and durability that retailers need. Whether it’s an oceanside restaurant that has to deal with extreme temperature swings and humidity, a clothing store that is regularly battling with dust and lint, or a grocery store where the risk of spills, drips, and leaks from products is constant, retail technology needs to withstand a wide variety of environmental hazards. Systems made from lower quality components that aren’t retail-hardened are more susceptible to damage and more likely to fail early on in their life cycle, so we design and test ours to ensure they meet a much higher standard.
Ready to move at the speed of innovation
With new customer expectations, innovative solutions, and consumer technologies, the retail industry is as dynamic as ever. To prepare retailers for the future, we build our solutions with technology that’s designed to last for years because to succeed today and in the years to come, retailers need to start with a solid foundation. We believe that investing in technology today doesn’t mean sacrificing flexibility and adaptability. In retail, a technology purchase and installation process can be more than two years long, so we work with component suppliers to ensure we’ll be able to manufacture necessary products and parts over several years. Deploying retail technology solutions that are made for the long haul – up to seven years for Toshiba point of sale and peripherals – can help ensure you’re ready for what’s next.
