If your c-store still uses a dial-up connection for data transmission and you thought you were one of only a few dinosaurs left, think again. You're actually part of the majority.
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Ricardo Jorge, director of customer retention and new market development for Don Mills, Ontario-based Line Share Devices Inc., said his company has found a niche in analog technology. As the company's name suggests, Line Share sells line-sharing devices for dial-up connections to retail customers of all sizes.
An economic solution
A dial-up connection for the phone, fax, POS, modem, ATM and/or kiosk just makes sense for most c-store locations, Jorge said.
Besides, most retailers don't think more expensive technology is a necessity, said Wally Hanna, vice president of participant services for Roselle, Ill.-based bill payment kiosk manufacturer Pay-Ease Inc.
"They don't see a need to invest in new technology right now, and dial-up connectivity certainly will be there for some time," Hanna said. "There will always be a need for dial-up telephones, even if that really is the trailing edge of technology."
Kiosk, ATM and line-share device manufacturers are catering to bearers of both old and new tech, and that's allowing c-store operators at different points on the technology scale to provide their customers with similar services.
"As you are deploying a kiosk, you need to offer connectivity options for each. You need to have options for dial-up, Wi-Fi and digital," Hanna said. "Our kiosks are designed to share the lines, so all you need is a splitter to share the line with the POS device." For other transactional kiosks or ATMs, "if they have a line-sharing device or modem device, they can be hooked up to share the line with the fax or POS in a similar way."
Gerry Tobin, POS project manager for Ontario retailer Country Style Doughnuts, said line-sharing is a necessity for a number of reasons, namely data transmission, at about 30 percent of his chain's 400 locations.
"It empowers our department to pull the sales data from each location over analog," Tobin said. "Line sharing provides us with an out-of-the-box answer to putting multiple applications on one device."
"There's not a necessity in a lot of the stores to make an investment in technology in the back of the house," he added, "so there's no demand for high-speed Internet. And in regions where high speed is not available geographically, we have a solution."
A smart solution
The intelligence of line-sharing also could keep system upgrades at bay, Hanna said.
Both Line Share Devices and Pay-Ease are enhancing analog capabilities by ensuring that certain devices have line-priority. And that level of dynamics is giving c-stores more economical options.
"We understand that if there are other transactions in the queue, our transaction waits," Hanna said. "The kiosks can share a line with the c-store POS line because the traffic is balanced."
This article appeared in the C-store Self-Service Executive Summary, Winter 2005.
