A couple of days ago I connected with Ewart Barnsley, congratulating him on a new role. It triggered an old memory, that I remembered with a chuckle when we worked together at NZTA.
If memory serves me well, it was around 1988 when I visited Pioneer New World in Palmerston North, New Zealand. I was Sales & Marketing Manager for Datachecker New Zealand. They were once a leading brand of supermarket scanning systems, that would later be purchased by ICL.
I called on every large owner-operated supermarket in New Zealand and this was one I hadn’t yet been able to close. The owner of the store was facing some stiff opposition with a giant Pak N Save supermarket about to be built nearby, and the owner felt that this was going to take a lot of business from him. He said that unless I had any great ideas to help him save his business, he wouldn’t be in a position to buy from him. he wasn’t sure if he would even survive the competition.
Always open to an opportunity, I told him I might just have the thing he needed. I asked if I could get back to him with a new product we were just launching that hadn’t been sold anywhere in the Southern hemisphere as yet.
I arranged to go back and see him a couple of weeks later and flew down with a great idea. Datachecker had just released a talking cash register. I kid you not. Positalker was part of National Semiconductor’s Innovations from Santa Clara. It could call out the price of each item, the subtotal and how much change you would get from your cash. Speech synthesis was relatively new, not what we take for granted in 2022.
It was a gimmick and we didn’t make a secret of that. But he had told me that his point of difference was that a lot of his customers were elderly, living within walking or mobility scooter distance and this could give them confidence that they knew what they were paying without having to watch the display.
So the day before, I arrived in Palmerston North and set up a demonstration system. I had gone into his store and bought a few products on the sly, to scope his store a little more. Then took them back to my hotel to set it up. I found that I needed to get owners out of their isles to present to them, or they would be constantly drawn into problems by staff.
Being something never seen before in New Zealand, it was highly newsworthy and we planned to make it into an event that would draw news media and the public. Datachecker in Santa Clara, my employer, came to the party and included the speakers and software chips for the text to speech for free, so he also got a good deal with what was then state of the art technology.
To take you back, if you were around, this was the time in New Zealand when Annie Crummer, Debbie Harwood, Kim Willoughby, and Margaret Urlich won our hearts as When the Cat’s Away, with Melting Pot.
This song is of course on my Spotify Top #500 songs. My wife and I had the privilege of seeing these ladies perform live on a number of occasions. All of them are amazing singer-songwriters in their own right, they started a bit of a tradition of amazing Kiwi divas jamming and having lots of fun on stage.
Anyway, I got the order and with the support of Foodstuffs Wellington, we got to ‘live day’. We did the usual testing, making sure the database was up to date and we were ready.
We had TVNZ’s Ewart Barnsley report on New Zealand’s first talking cash register and Miss Manawatu officially help us go live by cutting a ribbon. It was a big day for a small store.
So cut cameras to myself, the owner of the store and an elderly woman who was first in the queue to arrive at the checkout with a small basket of groceries. A cashier duly scans the products and a woman’s voice in an American accent calls out the price of each item, the subtotal and her change, while we proudly watch the proceedings.
Once she has her groceries, the cameraman follows Ewart who asks her what she thought of the ‘talking cash register’. She looked up at us, unphased by the glitz and glamour, clutching her grocery bag and said “You’ll have to speak up sonny, I’m deaf.”
It should have made TV bloopers and I was worried that TVNZ would use that clip, but Ewart agreed we wanted to paint the story of how the store was providing a great service for the public and found a customer who really liked the service, which is what aired on national TV in a 20-second clip.
I can’t locate my photos from this day, but I know they are somewhere, so watch out for an update at some stage, of this momentous occasion. The store survived and in fact thrived despite the opposition of even more large supermarkets. It looks like it was rebuilt, so it’s not exactly the store with the talking cash register in 1988. It even has a Facebook page.
#NewWorld #Foodstuffs #Datachecker #Positalk #Retailinnovation #funny #TVNZ #Retailhistory
Cutting the ribbon sounds so cool!