Ames checkouts in the 70s and 80s

[swedaman]

I am a collector and restorer of mechanical cash registers made by Sweda. These registers were used by Ames through the early 1980s. My interest in these machines increased considerably with the opening of Ames #80 in Pulaski, N.Y.

I have written down memories of the checkouts at Ames #80 in the late 1970s in a blog post and I thought some folks might be interested in it. I'll be updating it more as I remember or find more information.

http://tinyurl.com/y9orfvq

[nims57]

Welcome swedaman!

Does Sweda still exist? Is it a Swedish company? Do you know if they made juicers too? I found an old product recall online about Sweda juicers sold at Jamesway and Caldor. There also is a thrift shop run by a church in my area that uses an old Sweda register.

[swedaman]

Sweda does exist in a very limited way. They are nowhere near as prevalent as they used to be, though. The name is used for a point of sale equipment company primarly in Canada, though there is a U.S. office in Dallas.. I don't know the relation between this new Sweda and the original one that made the mechanical cash registers that were found everywhere.

I remember Two Guys moving to an electronic Sweda system right before they went under. I don't know why Sweda's electronic based POS never caught on in the states; I remember it being rather efficient. I think Ames used an IBM mainframe in the back office for inventory control, so moving to a pure IBM system was probably the most cost efficient way to go.

It was interesting to watch the progression at Ames from the old inventory system to the one that was implemented with the IBM 3680 systems. As mentioned in my blog entry, Ames utilized a single-pass and double-pass system for ringing up items; clothing was double-pass which had a "class" and a "sku", everything else was single-pass which just used the class number. The class number became the first three digits of the famous eight-digit SKUs that had to be entered after the conversion to the IBM systems.  For example, records were class 668 and then became 66830662 (if memory serves correctly). Double pass items (for example sku 112 class 237) became 23701120. When the IBM registers were first introduced class numbers were padded with five zeroes: candy was 67200000 for a couple of years before moving to 67235515. Cashiers could fly through an order on the Sweda registers because they were comfortable with that type of technology. Customers used to get frustrated with the introduction of the IBM registers for the first year or so because it actually took longer for them to work vs. the Sweda (and NCR in the old Big N stores) registers because they were fairly slow at processing and they saw the cashier typing a lot of zeroes "just to fill up the screen" (eight digit LED screen).

One of the issues with the mechanical registers is that they would lock up - the mechanics inside would jam. If the problem couldn't be resolved by using the crank, the register would be swapped out with an extra register that usually sat on the end of a checkstand. Most stores would have one or two of these machines "just in case".