Aromas Coffeehouse owner Jeff Milewski said he’s happy with his decision to purchase ShopKeep’s point of sale system. “It’s just making things a lot more efficient,” he said. Photo by Michael Stacy
Aromas Coffeehouse owner Jeff Milewski is a good friend of mine and a regular reader of this site, so it’s pretty commonplace for him to pitch ideas of stories he’d like to see on Silicon Prairie News. Alas, not all Milewski’s suggested stories are — what’s the wording I’m looking for here? — remotely publishable.
For instance, his idea of an April 19 story warning readers that Skynet had become self-aware and was on the verge of turning against its creators — apparently some strange homage to an important date in The Terminator — got left on the cutting room floor.
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But, sometimes, Milewski is a source of far more viable story ideas. He provided one such nugget in mid-March, when he implemented a new point of sale system at his coffeehouse, located at 1033 Jones St. in the Old Market.
Aromas did away with its old cash register and upgraded to an iPad that runs the web-based point of sale system ShopKeep. Scheduled for release in the app store within a couple of weeks, ShopKeep for the iPad is still in beta and has about 80 users nationwide. According to Jason Richelson, the founder and CEO of New York-based ShopKeep, Milewski is the first business owner in Omaha — and possibly the entire Midwest — to use ShopKeep on an iPad as his point of sale system.
For Milewski, thoughts of making the switch began brewing around the time of last year’s Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, for which Richelson traveled to Omaha. Milewski met Richelson then and, intrigued by ShopKeep, kept in touch. When ShopKeep introduced the beta version of its iPad product earlier this year, Milewski pulled the trigger. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is perfect,’ ” Milewski said. “(It’s) a lot cheaper than buying a whole computer system with a touch screen.”
Between an iPad and a compatible cash drawer and receipt printer, Aromas spent about $1,000 on hardware. The shop spends another $49 per month for use of ShopKeep’s suite of services. Said Richelson: “People who’ve been using cash registers are really excited about switching because the hardware costs are a lot less” than they would be to upgrade to other point of sale systems.
Milewski said the capabilities ShopKeep enables — detailed analytics of sales trends, mobile access to financial data, the ability to keep a closer eye on inventory — make it worth the cost of the upgrade.
An iPad running ShopKeep sits in the spot once occupied by a traditional cash register at Aromas Coffeehouse. Photo by Michael Stacy.
“It gives me better flow of the day — when it is busy, what items I should get rid of that don’t sell at all,” Milewski said. “It’s just making things a lot more efficient.”
Well, most things are more efficient. First-time customers tend to linger a bit longer at the counter these days, intrigued by the new device. It has all but eliminated the challenge of conversing with customers about spontaneous subjects — of making coffee talk, if you will — but Milewski understands.
“It was exciting in the fact that I was able to have a new technology that was hip and cool that the customers would be interested in,” Milewski said. “It’s just a simple point of sale system, but it’s (interesting) the way someone utilized a consumer product like the iPad — which people associate with entertainment or consumption of media — into a practical device.”
Milewski said he thinks interest in the device has driven a few more customers his way. One even came from Kansas City to see the system in action, curious whether it would be a good fit for his donut shop back home. Cultiva Coffee in Lincoln, where Milewski buys coffee beans, adopted ShopKeep shortly after Aromas did.
“I thought that was interesting,” Milewski said of the Kansas City visitor. “I’m like, ‘Wow, people down in Kansas City have heard about this.’ So people are talking about it, and it’s a productive, efficient device that’s worth buying.”
It’s also a device that has taught Milewski, an entrepreneurial thinker in his own right, a thing or two about the potential for financial gain in working with technologies that are sensible if not sexy.
“Entrepreneurs should be focused on practical things …” he said. “That’s worth so much more to a business person than the next social-networking company … or, you know, coupon company. It’s making operations more efficient.”
With that, Milewski nodded toward Aromas’ ice machine, which had been in and out of order all day. “If the iPad could make ice,” he joked, “I would buy it.”
In the video below, Richelson demonstrates ShopKeep for the iPad. Video from ShopKeep.com.
