I go to a tony upscale grocery store. It is like Whole Foods without the weird liberal aspects. I’ve often noted that shopping at Whole Foods is a public display of piety. Howe else can you explain educated people paying double for fruits and vegetables? I recall being in one of the progenitor outlets called Bread & Circuses in Brookline Mass  and seeing people pay $10/pound for organic chicken. At the time, chicken was $2 a pound and would go on sale for half that price. I know for a fact that organic chicken tastes just like regular chicken so the only reason to buy the organic stuff was a public statement.  That was an easy conclusion since the shelves had signs with sanctimonious claims about the glory of organic chicken. My store is not that bad, but it serves a similar crowd. Loads of people show up with canvas sacks, for example.

The point here is that it is an upscale store serving upscale white suburbanites. These are folks who can be terribly fussy about small things. At checkout, the software they employ is clearly legacy stuff. Judging from the interface, I’m going to say it is written in COBOL. You can sort of tell by the blue screen with red highlights. It could be some form of business basic or maybe even Clipper/Foxpro. Regardless, it is old stuff, probably written for them two decades ago. Checkout is fast and efficient. The clerks never struggle to price an item or look up some obscure code for a weird item. For the grocery chain owners, the point-of-sale system is perfectly adequate and they obviously see no reason to “modernize it.”

I know of at least a dozen goodly sized companies that use legacy system for their business. In one case, they use a system written by a firm long defunct in a language long abandoned. The other use systems that are a decade or more pout of date and no longer supported by the developer. I know of a large importer using character based software written in the 80’s. The guy who wrote it is my business partner. The point here is that good enough is good enough. As much as we think technology is a constant driver of innovation and change, it does run its course. The lesson from the market is that we may have picked all of the low hanging fruit from the computer revolution.

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