Ok, yeah, sure, I’ll bite.
So let me get this straight. We - including myself - have been complaining about software issues we’ve been struggling with for years, yet one guy “praises” the company and he is showered with thousands in free gifts? What kind of business model is this? How is this suppose to make me feel better? Shouldn’t it be more like, “We appreciate the heck out of the guy that loves us, we really do, but man, what about these guys who don’t… The guys that are having real world problems. The guys that have major issues during $14k saturday nights. Shouldn’t we be concentrating a bit more on them? Shouldn’t we be offering them support?” Nah, of course not. I was turned off with you guys the first time I called after a month and a half of dropping 30 grand on a brand new install and support telling me, “sorry, you don’t have a support contract. click.”. Yeah, sure I get it. There isn’t money in selling printers; all the money is in the ink. Whatever.
Listen, everything about what you say above is malarkey, and before I continue I’m going to make it crystal clear that I do not in any way enjoy saying negative things about anyone or any company just for the hell of it.As a matter of fact, as a business owner, I hate it. But on the other hand, I also try and speak the truth, as you can tell from any of my posts over the years here. My post isn’t going to be company statistics. No, not at all. My post is going to be actual real world facts from an actual real world “customer” in a multi-store high volume, full service environment.
You mention different models that you offer. What is this? You’re saying you offer multiple hardware tiers now to different people based on sales? I guess my first question is… Why? I can run comparable software on outdated hardware running outdated operating systems if I wanted to. Even the cheapest new hardware available should be more than capable of running any point of sales software that is coded properly. I mean, you’re putting 2 gigs of ram in your “high end” terminals… Really? 2 gigs? I ran 2 gigs of ram in 2005. Oh, but you offer an “upgrade” for 100 bucks… You do know that 100 bucks can buy you 16 gigs of ram, right?
So you mention that you are selling “special” hardware for guys doing 3-5 million a year? That’s cute. My guess is you are upgrading the same terminals from 2 gigs to 4 gigs and charging an extra 900 per terminal and adding a few digits to the model number. Hey, I get it, how else can you afford to pay the rent of the Revention Music Center? The software should run fine on the same damn terminal regardless if I do 5 grand a year or 5 million a year. There should be no need for anything other than more drive space to hold a larger SQL database and a realistic amount of ram to process the queries. This model just doesn’t make sense to anyone who has a clue.
Reports… God forbid you need to run a “large” report. You guys need to read up on writing better SQL queries and database structures… I will refrain from posting examples of what I mean - for now. Let’s just say that pulling a yearly sales report shouldn’t take 15 minutes - it should take seconds, even on old hardware running 2 gigs of ram. This is fact.
The software itself could be great, which sucks. I wish I could sit down with the devs for a few hours, I really do, because so many of the bugs and missing features are laughably easy fixes.
The software is written in an outdated framework (like, .net 2 or something wild like that, I forget). It wasn’t always outdated obviously, back when .net 2 was bleeding edge it was great, but the problem here is that the code wasn’t maintained properly. Now the software essentially has to be rewritten from scratch to be brought up to today’s standards. This isn’t an easy feat, I know, I’ve been a developer for a long time, much longer than I’ve been in the pizza business.
Here are a few problems that I’m having this week
[]Tickets printing twice or sometimes three times. This happens at all locations, so it’s clearly a bug in the software. Happens at least three times a day.
[].net errors happen about 8-10 times a day forcing me to close and restart the revention
[]Credit card problems requiring me to restart the terminal and card reader - these problems started when they forced me to integrate with vantiv and external card readers
[]End of day doesn’t work at all. Just runs and runs and runs, cards don’t batch because of this so I have to manually do it in the morning
[]Employee times are off on sundays. Not sure why but the person who runs end of day on sunday gets their hours completely cut out of the calculations.
[]web orders don’t go through even though the customer says they did - very frustrating.
[]can’t use streets and grids on web deliveries so my drivers get shorted the extra fee on deliveries in specific zones. they told me it’s impossible. really?
[]tons of other random printing issues
[]employees working wrong hours (last week someone clocked 38 hours in a day… how is this posisble?
[]My terminals were partitioned with a ridiculously small windows partition and the remaining space for the “data” partition. Naturally windows updates and typical usage quickly took all the space of the windows partition. Why would you do this?
Some of you might think these are minor issues, but when you screw up two of the most important aspects of any business, payroll and income, we have a problem.
PS. I’m not looking for a handout and don’t want a phone call. I’m already in the process of “making the switch” from revention to (insert brand here).
I have a lot more to talk about, but not much more time today. Maybe later. But until then - click!
