Point of Sale systems were built for restaurants with waiters and kitchens. They were never designed for the chaos of a chai stall serving 300 orders in 2 hours.
Walk into any chai stall during rush hour. Students are shouting orders. The owner is simultaneously brewing, calculating, and collecting cash. Someone is asking "bhaiya, mera order?" for the third time. The notebook — if it exists — has illegible scribbles that will be forgotten by evening.
Now, walk into the same stall after a POS vendor has visited. You'll find one of two things: an abandoned tablet gathering dust, or the same chaos with an expensive machine nobody uses.
Why? Because every POS system sold in India was designed with the wrong assumptions.
Assumption 1: There's a Counter Person
Traditional POS systems assume someone is dedicated to "punching orders." In a restaurant, this makes sense — the waiter takes the order, enters it into the system, and the kitchen receives it.
In a chai stall, the person making chai IS the person taking orders IS the person collecting money. There is no separation of duties. The moment you add a "data entry" step, you've added friction to the most time-critical part of the operation.
The chaiwala doesn't need a faster way to enter data. He needs to eliminate data entry entirely.
Assumption 2: Staff Can Be Trained
POS vendors love to talk about "intuitive interfaces" and "easy onboarding." They assume a 30-minute training session will convert any shop worker into a proficient user.
Reality check: Most chai stall workers are hired for their speed in making chai, not their comfort with technology. The owner himself may not be comfortable navigating complex menus. And when the owner steps away, the helper — who barely knows how to use WhatsApp — is supposed to run the POS?
The system fails not because people are incapable, but because the system demands capabilities that are irrelevant to the actual job.
Assumption 3: The Business Needs "Features"
Open any POS dashboard. You'll find:
- Inventory management with SKU tracking
- Customer relationship management
- Employee attendance and payroll
- Multi-location synchronization
- Analytics dashboards with 47 different graphs
A chai stall owner doesn't need any of this. He needs to know: How many cups did I sell today? How much money should be in the drawer? That's it.
Every additional feature is cognitive overhead. Every menu option is a potential confusion. The POS industry confused "powerful" with "useful."
Assumption 4: Hardware is Acceptable
The minimum hardware requirement for most POS systems:
- Tablet or touchscreen: ₹15,000 - ₹40,000
- Thermal printer: ₹5,000 - ₹15,000
- Cash drawer: ₹3,000 - ₹8,000
- Card reader (optional): ₹2,000 - ₹5,000
Total: ₹25,000 to ₹70,000 before the first cup of chai is sold.
For a business with daily revenues of ₹3,000 - ₹10,000, this is months of profit locked into hardware that might break, get stolen, or become obsolete. The risk is asymmetric. The POS vendor wins the moment hardware is purchased. The chaiwala wins only if the system actually works — which, as we've established, it rarely does.
Assumption 5: The Problem is "Digitization"
This is the deepest flaw. POS vendors believe the notebook is a problem because it's "not digital." They think the solution is to digitize the notebook — to replace handwritten entries with typed entries.
But the notebook was never the real problem. The notebook is a symptom.
The real problem is chaos. Orders lost in noise. Payments confused. Customers frustrated. Staff overwhelmed. The notebook exists because there's no better way to track what's happening in real-time.
Replacing the notebook with a digital notebook doesn't solve chaos. It just moves the chaos to a different medium — one that's more expensive and less forgiving.
What Would Actually Work
The solution isn't a better POS. It's a fundamentally different approach:
- Remove the human bottleneck: If the customer can place their own order, the counter person becomes a preparer, not a data entry clerk.
- Use existing devices: Everyone already has a phone. Why buy new hardware?
- Eliminate training: If the system requires training, it's too complex. A good workflow should be obvious in 10 seconds.
- Solve for chaos, not data: The goal isn't to capture data. The goal is to stabilize the environment so data naturally emerges.
POS failed the chaiwala because it tried to impose restaurant logic on street-level physics. The chai stall doesn't need a point of sale. It needs a point of flow.
And that's a completely different design problem.