When did merchant decide it was worth investing in the POS to allow for credit card transactions?
Credit card have been around since the early 50′s.
What I am curious about, is when and how did merchant, specially small merchant, decide it is worth investing in upgrading their POS to allow customer to pay for their transactions with a credit card.
Visa and Mastercard really just started their growth in business in the 1970′s through present. Cards before were more for businessmen or club members such as Diners card.
Really POS became popular with the banks promoting POS machines or companies such as NCR creating the computers. For a banker it was a simple sale since most restaurants or retails having to make deposits the electronic of taking credit cards helped with the velocity of interchange of money. Business owners wouldn’t have to do additional deposit trips or withdraw additional funds.
Merchants after realizing that they were losing sales would opt buying POS machines especially if they had a bar code system to manage inventory. Technology makes it easier to do transactions, safer and helped with inventory tracking along with business sale reports. Even today with Paypal, Square or Googlepay it is easier for small merchants to take credit cards or even cell phone payment.