Retail Businesses Have Good Reasons for Preferring Thermal Paper Printers for Billing
Competition in the retail market has been increasing rapidly over the last couple of decades and that has resulted in retailers trying to increase efficiency in specific areas of operation. One such area of operation where they are enhancing their efficiency is the cash counter. This is where customers had to wait in long queues in the earlier days but not anymore. Today, most retailers have automated their billing processes by installing thermal printers at their cash counters. These printers don’t require consumables like ink and ribbons as they use chemically coated thermal paper supplied by POS paper roll manufacturers.
Thermal printers have taken convenience to a different level
When you compare the convenience and ease of operations that thermal printers offer with that of the earlier systems where reams of copier-size paper had to be fed into large, noisy and static dot-matrix printers, it’s easy to see why thermal printers are so popular today. Even if you set aside the wastage of paper in the dot-matrix printers, its integration with a computer system proved to be a barrier for many of the old-fashioned retailers. They would rather prefer pre-printed receipt books where the transaction details needed to be written down by hand. This would push up transaction time beyond the patience threshold of today’s customer.
Efficiency and economy of thermal printers are incomparable
Now let’s see how a thermal printer functions and what makes it so preferable for all POS personnel. To begin with, it is a small and compact hand-held device that can be carried to all corners of the shop and not just the cash counter. Next it needs small POS paper roll from suppliers who are as efficient as the thermal printers for which they supply the paper. The printing on thermal paper happens via heat transfer through the print head onto the coated thermal paper surface when the chemical on the paper reacts to the heat. The operator just needs to press a few buttons to get the optimized printout – no wastage of paper and no need of expensive ink or ribbons.