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Card Skimmer Caught In WA State 5/31/2013 9:00:00 PM
As PCI standards have become more stringent, there’s been some hesitation from retailers and restaurant owners. Ensuring your business is compliant can be expensive, and the standards have been a relatively mobile target over the years. One of the big ones on the horizon is table-side payment, which can be a tremendous cost, including mobile computers and software to take payment.
But the upside is your customers can be certain that their card isn’t being compromised, like in this KIRO article of a Red Robin employee skimming cards and then making major purchases with the card data. If you don’t feel like checking out the nitty gritty of the article, the employee had a secondary card reader, probably something that paired with her phone or maybe a custom built device to batch store card data. When she’d ring up the customers, she’d also swipe the card in the device and have all the info needed to perform online purchases.
This is usually the portion of the post where I talk about the great products that make it easy to have table-side payment. And there are some options available, such as the Motorola MC40, or mobile card readers for iOS & Android devices. But the big thing is that these kind of situations can cause problems for business owners, such as an increase in liability insurance, or increased processing fees. So while meeting PCI standards can have a steep initial investment, in the long term you are definitely going to save money and provide a safer and better experience for your customers.
Seiko Qaliber Receipt Printer 5/13/2013 10:48:56 PM
Seiko, the makers of fancy watches, is taking a stab at building receipt printers. Their Qaliber RP-E is available and offers pretty strong performance at a good price.
So the Qaliber (pronounced Caliber and not Kwaliber) is a cube, 5 inches on a side, which is an interesting aesthetic and adds to the printer’s stackability. It’s available with standard topside printing and also front-feeding, in case you need to mount it under a desk or you want to put something on top of it, like a stylish vase. I think the only difference is how the labeling on the front is oriented, so you could have both top and front-feed functionality from either printer.
So you see that glowy blue glowiness on the printer? That’s an LED bar that chan change color depending on your preference. So say you want it to be green, you mess with the driver and boom, green LEDs. Seiko says it does a few shades of blue/green for regular mode, then red/magenta for errors. It’s a pretty striking accent and could help make counter space look a little nicer.
In terms of performance, the Qaliber lines up nicely with higher end printers. A near 14″ per second print speed is remarkably fast, hopefully nobody gets papercuts as a result of impatiently trying to grab the receipt. Time for some math: a standard receipt paper roll is 220 feet long, 2,640 inches. Just firing out one gigantic 220-foot receipt would take the Qaliber 3 minutes and about 10 seconds. Whereas a competing printer with an 11.8″ per second print speed would take 3 minutes and 43 seconds. A full half a minute per roll, or twenty five minutes per box of paper. It’s crazy to see how this scales up so quickly.
The Qaliber’s also built for long lasting performance. The printhead is rated at 99 miles of printed receipts, or 2,376 rolls of receipts, or 125 hours of straight printing. Its autocutter provides over 2 million cuts, which just sounds like a ton of receipts. It also ships with a 3-year warranty, which is pretty standard for printers.
Bottom line: The Seiko Qaliber receipt printer is a high-performance option for retailers wanting to speed their checkout process. The unique design and stylish accents make it a great way to maintain a clean, modern look at your checkstand as well.