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regarding: catalina connections
Some things have been made nearly impossible to search for. Say, for example,
the long-running partnership between Epson and Catalina: a query that will
return pages upon pages of people trying to use Epson printers with an old
version of MacOS.
When you think of a point of sale printer, you probably think of something like
the venerable Epson TM-T88. A direct thermal printer that heats small sections
of specially coated paper, causing it to turn black. Thermal paper of this type
is made in various widths, but the 80mm or 3 1/8" used by the TM-T88 is the
most common. The thermally-reactive coating on the paper incorporates some,
umm, questionable chemicals, but moreover, the durability of direct thermal
prints is poor. The image tends to fade over not that long of a timespan.
Besides, the need for special paper is an irritation.
So, there are other technologies available. Thermal transfer, in which a ribbon
of ink (I suspect actually a thermoplastic) is pressed against the paper and
heated to cause the ink to stick, is often used for more durability-sensitive
applications like warehouse labeling. The greater flexibility of paper (or
plastic) stock sees thermal transfer used in specialty applications as well,
like conference attendee badges. Thermal transfer printers tend to be more
expensive and more complex than direct thermal, though, and are rarely used at
the POS.
Impact printers are actually fairly common in a POS-adjacent application. These
printers punch metal pins against an inked ribbon, pushing it against the paper
to leave a mark. Impact printers were actually the norm for receipt printing
prior to the development of inexpensive thermal printers. They remain popular
in restaurant kitchens: the plain paper they use is less readily damaged by
oils, and won't turn entirely black if exposed to too much heat, as might
happen when a ticket is clipped above a grill. Impact receipt printers today
are often referred to as kitchen ticket printers as a result.
Impact receipt printers, and many impact printers in general, have a neat
trick: you can manufacture an ink ribbon in two colors, say, black on one half
and red on the other. By either using two sets of impact pins or shifting the
position of the impact head, either black or red can be printed. Dual-color
printers with black and red ribbons became ubiquitous for kitchen tickets,
although the red doesn't tend to reproduce well from an old, dry ribbon.
The ability of impact printers to use plain paper had another advantage: slip
printing. A slip printer is a device intended to print characters on a small
piece of paper inserted into it. Historically they were often used by bank
tellers to print account and reference numbers onto deposit slips, for later
auditing. In other applications they functioned as more sophisticated
"received" stamps, adding not just the time and date but customer account or
transaction numbers to received paperwork. The legal profession has a tradition
of "Bates numbering," which traces its history to a rather different printing
device, but Bates numbers could be applied by slip printers as well. In this
case, of course, we would need to refer to them as Generic Sequential Page
Numbers, Compare to Bates (TM).
A variant of the slip printer, really a receipt printer (often thermal) and
slip printer (often impact) married into one box, is known as a check
validator. Very common in grocery stores until recently, these printers both
produced receipts and printed an audit number and endorsement on the back of
the check a customer might offer in payment. It's difficult to imagine paying
for groceries with a check, but it used to be a common practice. For many
years, the practicalities of accepting checks were a major driver of POS
technology. When a cashier rung you up, there were two options: they pushed the
cash button, and the POS "bumped" the cash drawer open, or they pushed the
check button, and the POS sent an endorsement to the check validator. The
close coupling of these two features means that cash drawer bumping is
traditionally the task of the receipt printer, and cash bump outputs are
common to this day.
But where, exactly, is this tour of POS printing technology taking us? Well,
you might notice the absence of the humble inkjet. It might seem surprising:
inkjet mechanisms can actually be quite compact, and they tend to be a natural
evolution of impact printing. Well, there are indeed inkjet printers in the
receipt printer class, but there are some practical considerations. Moving a
smaller print head across the paper in bands requires a more complex mechanism,
and it's slow compared to printing in one pass. Inkjet heads large enough to
span the whole width of the receipt tape are fairly expensive.
And after all that, inkjet seems high maintenance compared to the almost
bulletproof reliability of direct thermal printers. Consider the state of the
average gas pump "CRIND" (Card Reader In Dispenser) receipt, and then consider
that the small thermal mechanism is still managing to produce that output after
many years in the harsh conditions of the outdoors. Inkjets tend to quickly
malfunction without some sort of automated mechanical cleaning, and that's
under office conditions.
So, to put it succinctly, inkjet receipt printers just aren't popular.
You could make similar comments about office printers, where inkjet suffers
in many ways when compared to laser or LED printers. But they have been a
tremendous success at the lower end of the market. There are a few reasons
for this outcome, but one of the bigger ones is color: for a laser or LED
printer to produce color used to be rather complicated. In the '00s, many
inexpensive color laser printers were "four-pass" printers: the page had to
be looped through the print engine four times, one for each color! It saved
a lot of parts but made printing more than four times slower. Inkjets were
far from this problem. It's a fairly simple matter to make an inkjet print
head that serves multiple colors in one assembly!
The same ideas are applicable to receipt printers. If you, for some reason,
want a full-color receipt, inkjet is the way to go. But no one wanted a
full-color receipt. Even dual-color impact printers disappeared into the
kitchen.
And then a company called Catalina came along. Catalina keeps a somewhat low
profile among consumers, certainly lower than the MacOS release. Search results
suggest lower even than the island off of Los Angeles, for which the company,
and the MacOS release, are named. There's no Wikipedia article about Catalina,
and their own About Us brief and made up mostly of nonsense like this:
Transforming data into insights, and insights into action through a seamless
consumer experience that drives results.
Catalina is one of those companies that you never think about, but that is
constantly thinking about you. Today we would call it ad-tech.
Catalina is tough to research. Obviously they did not intentionally choose a
name that would become a MacOS release; they were using the Catalina name many
years earlier. But it does seem like they have participated in a bit of
obfuscation. Today, they continue to advertise a charming phone number:
1-800-8-COUPON. This "translates," of course, to 1-800-826-8766. During the
1990s they ran numerous classified ads using this phone number, but the numeric
version instead of the easier to remember "vanity" representation. The ads were
for advertising associate positions, but curiously did not mention the name of
the company at all.
Actually, some of these ads give a slightly different phone number,
1-800-826-8768. It is quite conceivable that both phone numbers were issued to
the company, given the different toll-free number industry of the '90s. But the
fact that OCR frequently confuses these two numbers leads one to suspect that
some of the 8768 ads may have been a copy mistake.
Even better, a few of the ads for the 8768 number, and one ad with the 8766
number, *do* give the name of a company, but an unfamiliar one: Aquarius
Enterprises.
Aquarius Enterprises was a "register tape advertising" or "receipt back
advertising" venture. In other words, they sold advertising on the backs of
receipts. Curiously, while Catalina mentions their 40-year history, Aquarius
Enterprises calls themselves "the most successful register tape advertising" for
"over 25 years"... in 1993. Are they the same company? Well, they used the same
phone number. Catalina is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida today, but
seems to have moved, as early articles describe then as Anaheim-based... rather
closer to the El Segundo address often used by Aquarius Enterprises.
Perhaps it is a coincidence of similar phone numbers and similar industries,
but I strongly suspect that Catalina was a spin-out of Aquarius Enterprises. I
tried finding shared employees, but there is remarkably little information
about Aquarius Enterprises outside of their classified ads for sales
associates. But then, once again, it's not an easy name to search for.
Whatever its origins, Catalina launched in 1985 with "Coupon $olutions."
Besides the cringeworthy name, this venture was remarkably similar to what
consumers will know them for today: Coupon $olutions consisted of software
that recorded a consumer's purchases at the POS, and then printed on-demand
targeted coupons.
Early articles about Catalina describe the system as relatively simple.
Coupons would be printed for "complimentary items." For example, the purchase
of baby food would result in an coupon for diapers. The coupons themselves were
also simple: printed in monochrome on tape with a distinctive printed edge.
Coupon $olutions debuted at two Boys markets in Los Angeles. It grew fast. By
1990, Catalina's coupon printers were installed in 3,300 grocery stores
nationwide. Newspaper coverage started to mention privacy concerns in the
1990s, waving them away with Catalina's assurances that there was no privacy
concern because they tracked only purchases and not the shopper's identity. Of
course, in the late '80s Catalina had trialed a shopper loyalty card program
that would rather change that situation, but it seems to have been
unsuccessful.
As time passed, Catalina expanded further into retail technology. They opened
their own clearinghouse service for coupons, and marketed their on-demand
coupon system to stores as an analytics product, since it provided real-time
reporting on purchases (in this era even large retailers would often not have
granular, fast reporting from their POS system).
The 1990s treated Catalina well, but they seem to have flown a little too
close to technology, and the dot com bust hit them as well. In the early '00s,
they weathered layoffs, an accounting probe, and a stock dive. Still, 2005
brought a big step forward: color.
Yes, we're finally back to the point. Catalina Marketing partnered with Epson
to introduce a special variant of the TM-C610 color receipt printer, called
the TM-C600. Called the CMC-6 by Catalina, the printer uses a full-width
inkjet head to produce 360 DPI full color on 57.5mm paper.
Lately, though, you may have noticed these printers yielding unsatisfactory
results. When I've gotten Checkout Coupons at all, they've been barely
legible or, increasingly, completely blank. Curious.
Catalina went bankrupt in 2018, and underwent a reorganization. The company
emerged, but apparently not by that much, as it went bankrupt once again in
2023. Catalina offers a fully managed service, meaning that they ship stores
new ink cartridges when remote monitoring of the printers indicates that it
will be needed. I have a suspicion that Catalina's second bankruptcy has
introduced some disruptions. And yet, in an article they claim:
Catalina is assuring clients and shoppers that it’s still business as usual,
and ongoing promotions won’t be affected. “There will be no interruption in
Catalina’s ability to serve its customers or any impact on how it works with
them,” Catalina says.
I'm not sure that this is working out, even a year into the bankruptcy process.
Safeway/Albertsons has apparently decided to remove the Catalina printers
entirely. Smith's (Kroger) doesn't seem to maintain them at all. Walgreens is
apparently more committed to the cause, as they are with the cooler screens,
but even there checkout coupons have become inconsistent.
Besides, I don't think even Catalina views the printers as very important any
more. They're relegated to a small corner of Catalina's website, with the vast
majority of their marketing material dedicated to analytics, targeting, and
digital marketing. Catalina seems to be a major player in the in-app digital
coupons now emphasized by a lot of grocers, although I've personally found
the system to be laughably unusable. But it's not surprising that you get a
laughably unusable app from an industry that churns out this kind of copy:
84.51° currently delivers personalized promotional offers to Kroger’s
digitally engaged shoppers via its website, mobile app, and more broadly via
its Loyal Customer Mailer. Catalina Reach Extender is a complementary
solution to the way current offers are delivered and will expand the impact
of promotional offers by aligning those offers to the way customers shop –
in-store, online or both.
As far as I can tell, this press release is just describing making digital
coupons (managed by a company that is, improbably, called 84.51°) also print
out on the Catalina printers. The ones that barely work any more. Well, that
was January of '23, they didn't know about the second bankruptcy yet.
Catalina may date to 1985, but it's sort of a case study in the advertising
industry. It's a huge, publicly traded company, with a market cap that's
reached at least $1.7 billion, and two bankruptcies. They write such obtuse
copy that it's hard to understand what exactly they do these days, which is
probably mainly a way to distract from the fact that their main business is now
collecting and selling consumer data. And I would say that no one likes them...
subreddits of retail employees are full of comments expressing relief when the
Catalina printers would break, since unplugging them would result in multiple
phone calls a day from Catalina investigating the "problem."
BUT: there are couponers.
That's right, there's a whole internet subculture that is obsessed with these
checkout coupons. They catalog the coupons on offer, and document the process
for requesting a replacement coupon from Catalina when the one you expected
failed to print. So very strange to me, a reminder of the many people out there
and their many strange hobbies.
Why would you ever waste your time on these coupons? I have real things to do,
like collecting thermal printers.
sincerely,
j. b. crawford
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