National Pig Day!

Woodlawn Community Academy, where we are located, has an amazing and supportive parent board.  This year the parent board raised the funds to purchase 40 ipads for the students to use in small groups.  This week, we started using the iPads at the Swanky Swine. We downloaded the Square register application (https://squareup.com/register) to use as our cash register. The application allows us to take pictures of all of our products and input our own prices.  We can even take credit cards! The employees love it and it makes adding purchases, making change and tracking sales really easy.

We started on Monday by introducing the program and letting the students practice ringing in sales.

Each pair of students shared an ipad and they took turns acting out the customer and the cashier for practice. The person who was playing the customer never made it easy on the cashier. Marlena ordered one of everything and then added 20 more blow pops.

The iPads really enhance our employment training.  The register program we chose is currently utilized in more than a million small businesses.  Even Starbucks has recently started accepting Square payments.  Proficiency in this application will be an asset to future employers.

The employees picked up the register very quickly and we started using it in our store on Wednesday.

We set up 2 registers so we could serve our customers quickly.  We had to adjust our processes a little so the first day was a bit bumpy.  We’re running out of space again! However, the employees stuck it out and by the end of the shift were a lot more comfortable.

Friday was National Pig Day so of course we had to honor our namesake.  We offered bacon brownies that were a bit hit!

It ended up being one of our busiest shifts this year.  After our bumpy shift on Wednesday, we made a few small changes that really helped the Friday crew have a smooth shift.  After ringing up each purchase, the students use their money math skills to give proper change to every customer.  The iPads have really boosted the employees confidence and it was awesome to watch them work so quickly and proficiently.  They enjoyed being able to track their sales and became really invested in “getting our number higher.”

All in all it was an exciting week at the Swanky Swine.  When asked how they liked working with the iPads both shifts responded with these pictures:

I’d say they were a hit.