Retail

[Sdaniel]

Hey everyone!

I’m wondering if any restaurants sell retail items without using Toast Retail?

At our locations, we sell handcrafted coffee mugs, and during the holiday season, we offer a limited edition "Holiday Mug" with a different design and pricing.

We have a retail menu on our POS to ring in the mugs. Last year, we created two separate mug buttons—one for the "EHC Belly Mug" and one for the "Holiday Mug." However, we ran into an issue where employees were mistakenly selecting the EHC Belly Mug instead of the Holiday Mug, which skewed our numbers.

This year, we revised the process by creating a single "Mug" button with a forced modifier to select the type of mug. Despite this change, our team is still selecting the wrong mug when selling the Holiday Mug.

Given that the monthly cost for Toast Retail seems high for the small amount of retail we sell, we’re exploring other ways to set up these items in the system—ideally with a method that minimizes user error completely.

Any insights or suggestions from others who might be in a similar situation would be greatly appreciated!

[au79teahouse]

You can post pictures of the mugs near your POS system to provide employees with a clear visual reference when ringing up mug items. Alternatively, you can add item pictures directly in the system, though this method may be less intuitive since employees would need to click the "Detail" button to view them.

Another option is to use handheld scanners and provide a printed list of retail items with corresponding pictures and barcodes for easy scanning. While these measures can help reduce errors, it’s important to note that human mistakes can never be entirely eliminated. Implementing an end-of-day retail inventory check could help identify any discrepancies and pinpoint if specific individuals are repeatedly ringing up the wrong items.

[Sdaniel]

Unfortunately, it seems that human error is the root cause of the issue, despite our efforts to present the information in different formats for clarity. Our goal is to avoid incurring additional costs to resolve this.

For every limited-time offer, we provide training to our employees, so it may be necessary to add this particular scenario to our training materials to ensure the mugs are rung in correctly.

[nbunda]

Definitely tough with user error. I’ve made it a point to dumb down the POS buttons as much as possible. Are the mugs different colors where you can call them “red mug” “white mug” or something in the POS name, and/or change the button colors? Any kind of cue to make the user feel even slightly uncomfortable entering the wrong item, but enough to differentiate the two. Other than that it’s just training and posted reminders, but user error will still happen.

[Sdaniel]

We've taken a similar approach, focusing on keeping buttons as simple as possible. These mugs are typically only seen during the holiday season each year, and it’s clear they stand out from our regular, all-year-round mugs. A lot of the ringing issues we encounter likely come down to better training specifically for this item. I posted pictures of the buttons and how to ring them in on our all company team channel, but even with that we still ran into this issue. 

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!