Caribou Coffee Installs Point Of Sale Kiosks

According to this story at AMonline,

Caribou Coffee says it has helped improve the customer experience at its 400 shops worldwide by implementing innovative IBM kiosk and point of sale (POS) technologies. Working with RDS Systems of Minneapolis, Minn., IBM has installed more than 900 SurePOS 500 point of sale systems and more than 100 IBM Anyplace Kiosk units at the Caribou locations, with plans to install 300 additional Anyplace Kiosk units by 2008. As a result, Caribou can be even more responsive to customer requests, handling even the most complex orders quickly, efficiently and accurately.

IBM Anyplace Kiosks help Caribou enhance employee productivity. Located in the barista (coffee-making) stations, these compact units help employees process orders quickly and easily using an advanced infrared touch screen display. Caribou says they are piloting these all-in-one kiosks as a manager's workstation at two of its freestanding mall stores and are evaluating their use for employee training.

Caribou is also looking at customer-facing applications. One of these would feature easy-to-read information on menu items, specials and promotions.

I would like to have known more about the applications running on the IBM Anyplace kiosks, which are basically like POS stations on steroids. Bigger screens, more powerful CPUs and great multimedia capabilities make these tough little units ideal for high-end POS services (in places that can afford them, anyway), or any user-facing self-service application, which is probably why Caribou selected them.