Last weekend’s sale was 60% better than I’d hoped. At 11am on Saturday people were lined up nine deep at the cash register.

As a result, I’ve rebooked the ads and we’re on again over the next two weekends. The ad booking got messed up for this weekend so we are only in one local paper at 75% of the size. We’re getting that insertion free. Next week I’ve extended to the Bankstown Torch and back to bigger ads.

This weekend may be a bigger drop in sales due to the smaller ad and circulation. It will be interesting to track that.

I have the cash register dockets to analyse now, hopefully I’ll integrate that info with future data. But I had an ancient cash register which only allows 4 departments and no detailed sales analysis. That is no way to re-design a business model, so I was looking at a better (expensive) point-of-sale system when we found one in a box in the back of the warehouse!

Hoo-boy we were excited to get that working. It’s a 486 running Windows 95 linked to a barcode scanner and a cash-drawer. The software is a DOS program called Quixale 2.6 from about 1995! Anyway I changed the company name for the printout and now it is unregistered. Dumb move especially as I had backed up the wrong directory. So now the software wont work and I can’t find the original spelling.

Anyway I’ve spent this evening looking for open-source POS software and have found a couple of canditates.

In a way it’s a good thing as I was worried about the 486’s stability. So now it will be driven by a newer PC running software we can get data out of.