Point of Sale

My father designed and sold components for small to medium grocery stores (BTW: his clients were small and could not always have the resources to pay for the hardware out right, so he created one of the first leasing companies to allow him sell more goods. His actions resulted in a new class of marketing and IRS attention). Anyway Dad keep asking why I could not make a point of sale system that would let small stores use scanners, Back then IBM and NCR controlled the market and you needed a big volume of sales to pay for their systems. So while I was teaching myself "C", I created a Database based point of sale system that utilized bar code scanners and serial terminals with attached printers that could be run 3 lanes off a standard PC, cutting the cost of NCR systems by orders of magnitude.

The invention of Club Pricing (down the rabbit hole)

Building the entire system around a Database opened up a whole new set of opportunists for the system. At first I started keeping track of stock for reordering, (that lead to electronic ordering), then I brought over a concept from the Auto Parts world, buyer discounts. In Auto Parts there are different prices for the same product depending on the buyer (Retail, jobber, shops and regional chains), I created the concept of a Store Club member who would get a better price set than the average retail buyer and in order to offset the dollar loss I created a Sales tracking systems which allowed the store to sell the buying pattern to vendors and research firms yielding more revenue that the actual profit of the sale of the goods. This got me a place in supermarket history and changed the business model forever. All thanks to my Dad, Irv Freedman.

"Greed over Logic"

Also this was to be my first time meeting "Greed over Logic". I defined that term as when money hits the table some people act like Sharks when they smell blood in the water.

In this case my long time marketing partner who had agreed to be equal partners in the Point of Sale venture, I would designed and built it, and he would be the salesman. He saw the success as an opportunity steal as much as he could. We were taking the company public and we each had to give up hunks of our share to do so. The Red Heering (SEC Disclosure), listed me as VP of Technology holding 20% of the company and himself as President holding 30%. I was OK with that as there was going to be plenty of money to go around however as we were to go on the market he elected to place a hold of five years on my stock and not on his. I protested but he said he needed to keep me tied down or I might leave and was the only one who knew anything about the product, as I had build it single handed.

Sadly he would not back down even after I agreed to sign a contract with the company, now the key thing here was that I had never worked for the company and they had not only made no contributions to my efforts, neither by cash or labor and did not own or poccess the code as I had never given them anything other than marketing rights.

We fell out and I left them with the marketing right and they gave me nothing. Soon they realized that without me they would need to cancel the stock offering and return the money they had gotten from investors so rather than work with me they filed a computer theft charge against me to try and get the police to take my computers and give them to them, thereby getting the source code. It did not work and we ended up in court, they claiming I stole computers from them that had no ideals of what the computers were and they could show no records for buying. Needles to say they settled mid court for a payment of $100,000 for the source code.

Without any real knowledge of the design or access to someone who knew how to expand it they sold a few instances and then quietly died.

Like a shark in a frenzie, they eat thier own selves.