There's a gap in the market for point-of-sale systems, and if you haven't worked in independent retail, you probably don't see it.
On one end you have enterprise solutions — full-featured, expensive, designed for chains with IT departments and multi-year contracts. On the other end you have cheap tablet-based systems that work fine for a coffee shop but fall apart when you need to manage 8,000 SKUs, track inventory by weight, handle EBT payments, and run gas pumps.
Grocery and convenience stores sit right in that gap. Too complex for the simple tools, too small for the enterprise ones. That's where REVOLT lives.
What competitors miss
I've spent time analyzing what's out there. Systems like CronyPOS and the major players all share a pattern: they built for the largest possible market and then try to squeeze smaller operators into that mold.
The result is predictable. Features that grocery stores need — price-per-pound for deli items, EBT SNAP and EBT Cash as separate tender types, lottery integration, age-restricted item enforcement — are either missing, bolted on as expensive add-ons, or implemented in ways that don't match how these stores actually operate.
A cashier at Poco Loco doesn't need a tablet with a pretty interface. They need a system that can scan 60 items per minute, handle a split payment between EBT and cash without five extra taps, and keep working when the internet drops. Speed and reliability at the register aren't nice-to-haves — they're the entire job.
The Poco Loco test
We use Poco Loco as our filter for every feature decision. When someone suggests adding something to REVOLT, the question is always: "Would this help at Poco Loco?"
My uncles deal with real operational problems every day. Inventory shrinkage that's hard to track because the system doesn't give them good tools. Employee scheduling that lives in a paper notebook. End-of-day reports that take 20 minutes to reconcile because the POS data doesn't match the cash drawer.
These aren't glamorous problems. No one's going to write a TechCrunch article about better cash drawer reconciliation. But solving them is the difference between a store owner going home at 8 PM versus 10 PM.
Our approach
REVOLT is opinionated. We build for grocery and convenience stores. Not restaurants, not salons, not e-commerce. That focus lets us make decisions that generalist POS systems can't.
We store all prices in cents as integers — no floating-point rounding errors on a $3.49 item scanned 200 times a day. We built offline-first because we know the internet situation in strip malls. We designed the multi-tenant model around how family-owned stores actually operate: one owner, maybe two or three locations, shared catalog with per-store pricing.
Every unit of measure in our system — pounds, ounces, gallons, each — exists because grocery stores need them. We didn't add them as an afterthought to a system designed for selling t-shirts online.
The path from here
Poco Loco is our pilot. When they're running REVOLT in production — when the registers are fast, the inventory is accurate, the reports are useful, and the system works even when the internet doesn't — that's our proof point.
From there, it's every Poco Loco. Every neighborhood grocery and convenience store that's been underserved by software built for someone else.
We grew up in these stores. We know what they need because we've lived it. That's not a marketing line — it's the reason REVOLT exists.