Ringing up at a lighter, mobile cash register

The humble cash register, a device that seems sprung from the imagination of an accountant, has become the darling of designers, adding a dash of style to the most ordinary daily transactions.

With the advent of tablets, particularly the iPad, many stores have traded in their clunky cash registers for mobile devices. Now, though, they are dressing up those tablets with inventive accessories to make them both more pleasant to look at and more practical for cashiers.

Retailers from doughnut shops to department stores are putting in tablet-based cash registers that hang on the wall or can swivel around like desk lamps to face customers. At Coco Donuts in downtown Portland, Ore., iPad registers hang on a track on the wall, and employees slide them over to customers at the counters, who can sign for their bill, barely missing a bite.

Some designers are using eye-catching materials like bamboo to make iPad enclosures that scream for attention; others are using minimalist designs that make the register all but disappear. And sales associates are plucking the tablets off countertops so they can take orders from anywhere in a store using tiny credit card readers attached to the devices.

Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream is ditching the button-encrusted Casio monoliths at its Seattle stores, replacing them with six Apple iPads that sit on stylish, handcrafted plywood pedestals engraved with the store's logo of a dog (a Boston terrier and French bulldog mix) licking an ice cream cone.

"The new iPads are a huge aesthetic improvement over our old clunky plastic registers," said Kristina McDonnell, Molly Moon's director of operations, who ordered the stands from Tinkering Monkey, an Oakland, Calif., studio.

Cash registers have gone through many mutations since they were first introduced in the late 1800s by an Ohio merchant looking to combat employee theft. They were electrified in the early 20th century, and more recently, got touch-screen displays.

Less has changed about their looks, however. Cash registers have remained a hulking presence - "always industrial and ugly," said Kirthi Kalyanam, a professor at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

In addition to being more attractive, the new registers are more flexible and user-friendly, like the ones at Coco Donuts. By putting the registers on the wall, the store's owner, Ian Christopher, freed up counter space for coffee drinks and doughnuts.

And along with the new physical designs are new payment technologies that turn mobile devices into registers on the fly. The most prominent of these - a card reader, app and payment system from the San Francisco company Square - turns the earphone port of an Apple or Android tablet or smartphone into a credit card reader. For a small merchant like Christopher, it's not only convenient, but also saves him about 20 percent on credit card transaction fees compared with his old system.

At the Devil's Teeth Baking Co. in San Francisco's outer Sunset neighborhood, a local carpenter made a stand for the store's iPad out of wood and welded steel, with a base that is secured to a butcher block counter over a cash box. The industrial-looking contraption swivels around on a steel joint to face customers when they need to sign the screen.

"Four times a day, someone asks us where the stand comes from," said Hilary Cherniss, owner of the bakery.

Meanwhile, on Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods, Rob Redick sells iPad cash register stands made out of pieces of transparent acrylic, between which he can sandwich customized designs featuring merchant logos.

So far, the iPad has a big lead on other tablets that are being repurposed as cash registers, although companies like GoPago are promoting alternatives that use Google's Android technology.

Eventually, the need for receipt printers and cash drawers may vanish entirely as electronic payments through smartphones and other devices become commonplace. Wal-Mart recently expanded a program that lets customers scan the bar codes on merchandise using their iPhone cameras so they can skip conventional cash registers.

Some designers believe conventional cash registers interfere with the relationship between customers and sales people.

"From a design point of view, it's a disaster, and from a retail point of view, it's a disaster because employees are standing behind these refrigerators," said Dean Heckler, who owns his own design firm in Phoenix.

To help the cash register fade from view, Heckler has created a steel sliver of a stand for the iPad, called the WindFall, that sits low on a counter. It can be bolted onto a surface to prevent theft and pivot around to face customers.

Sales associates in Apple's own retail stores carry iPod Touches that are outfitted with credit card readers. Nordstrom, the apparel retailer, is also phasing out cash registers in all of its 240 stores and instead using iPod Touches to process payments from customers as they're sitting in the shoe department or in a dressing room.

Merchants are also catching on that they can use iPads and other mobile devices untethered from counters for "line-busting," in which cashiers approach people in a queue to take orders for food or merchandise. That improves service while making it less likely that those customers will leave since they have already paid.

The business of making iPad registers is so early that there is plenty of room for handcrafted designs.

In a workshop in San Diego, the Happy Owl Studio makes the Cashbox, a $1,500 iPad register, made of bamboo in amber and other shades, with space for a cash drawer and receipt printer integrated into its burly rectangular frame. A stand that holds the iPad on top tilts back and forth between customer and cashier."A lot of people look at it and say it looks steam-punkish," said Devon Read, chief executive of the studio, which has sold several dozen Cashboxes.

Parlin Jessen, co-owner of a Fiji Yogurt shop in San Diego, said his Cashbox has gotten a lot of attention. "Everyone asks, 'Where did you get this?"' he said.

Although there's nothing preventing cashiers from goofing off on the store's iPad by playing Angry Birds or checking email, Jessen said the prospect bothers him less than the alternative.

"It would be better that they're doing it on a supposed cash register instead of a phone," he said. "At least that way, it looks like they're doing work."

© 2013, The New York Times News Service