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The problem quickly became apparent.
"In those days, you had to open a case of items and scan each of the items inside, and the store staff did this with a box cutter."
To speed that process, store staff had taped a box cutter to the reader device – so they could open and scan with one hand and one tool.
"This involved slamming the LRT with the attached box cutter into thousands of boxes a day, which inevitably damaged the LCD screens," Lionel discovered.
He also discovered that 300 other stores in the mega-chain had independently devised the same "solution." And those stores were all ones that had complained about the laser terminal's lousy reliability.
Lionel wanted to tell store workers that knives and lasers don't mix.
"I'd like to say we just told everyone to stop taping knives to laser terminals and the problem went away, but that didn't work," he told On Call. "We ended up actually redesigning the LRTs to handle this type of use."