Exatouch POS Retailer Spotlight: Winesburg Meats, Inc.

Winesburg Meats has been family owned and operated for more than 60 years in Ohio’s Amish country. The Pacula family started in 1959 by running a small grocery store. Today, third generation co-owners Taras and Anton Pacula operate a 12,000-square-foot facility, offer more than 100 award-winning, preservative-free meats, and sell products in nearly every state.

Winesburg Meats relied on an old fashioned cash register and a standalone credit card terminal to process transactions for customers. With this system, there were frequent calculation errors by employees. Plus, each transaction took longer because of the added step of having to enter the price on the register into the card terminal. What’s worse, this extra step left the door open for additional entry errors.

When looking for a point of sale (POS) solution, Taras and Anton Pacula’s priorities were ease of use, the ability to integrate with their digital scale using an EAN-13 barcode, and ensuring the footprint would work for their countertop space. Cost was also a factor. “Exatouch^® Point of Sale was neither the most expensive, nor the cheapest. It was right in the middle,” said Taras.

In choosing Exatouch, the Paculas’ main goal was to alleviate employee mistakes and make training easier. But, they discovered something even more helpful after installation. “We found out what the heck we were selling!” Previously, they hadn’t kept track of how many pounds were sold or how frequently they needed to order a certain item. But within the first year of installing Exatouch, Winesburg Meats had hard numbers that showed which products were performing well and which weren’t selling. “Some items we manufactured simply out of tradition because that is the way Grandpa did it,” exclaimed Taras. Armed with data-driven insights gleaned from Exatouch’s many reporting features, the Paculas could make decisions on where to allocate their resources for maximum profit.

Winesburg Meats has been using Exatouch since April 2016 and it’s helping their business grow in many ways. Training employees is faster and “Exatouch makes checking out a customer nearly foolproof,” said Taras. The POS is paired with a semi-integrated PAX S80 terminal so there’s no longer a need to type in the total separately. With the new system in place, the checkout process has sped up significantly and employees no longer make calculation errors.

The company’s end-of-day batches are now all on one easy-to-use report. And, the Paculas are taking advantage of Exatouch’s built-in features to balance the register and send snapshots of the business to their emails, enabling them to keep digital copies of all credit card transactions. Additionally, Taras pulls a quarterly report from Exatouch to gain insight into sales trends and make decisions on which items need to be discontinued. “It was amazing to see that we had several items we’ve always carried only have about $150 – $200 in sales. We immediately let them go!”

After implementing Exatouch, Winesburg Meats began offering custom-designed gift cards to their shoppers through eGiftSolutions^®, an integrated gift card program. “Our gift card sales have probably doubled and our customers really seem to appreciate the convenience of it as well!”