The Modern Liquor Store POS: Smarter Inventory, Faster Checkout, and Better Customer Data
That’s where the point of sale comes in. Not the terminal on the counter, but the system behind it, the one that’s supposed to know what you have, how fast it’s moving, and who’s buying it. Most stores run something that does one of those jobs well. Very few do all three. Spirits are patient. A bottle of bourbon can sit on a shelf for eight months, and nobody’s worse off. Wine, mostly the same. Beer doesn’t work that way. Hop-forward styles fade in weeks. Seasonals have a window set by the calendar, not the can (nobody wants pumpkin beer in December. Okay, almost nobody). And craft brands rotate constantly, so your SKU list is never really finished. Here’s how I’d think about any POS decision for a store that moves a lot of beer. Every system is managing three clocks at once: IHL Group, which has tracked retail inventory distortion for nearly two decades, estimates that internal…