AT&T wants to make their retail experience a bit more like Apple’s in terms of the checking out process. If you’re unaware, Apple doesn’t have standard point of sales systems except for a couple MacBook Pros at the front of the store; the rest of the sales are made via the Apple Store app using QuickPay or by asking an Apple Store employee equipped with an iPod touch to help you check out. The AT&T store is completely different. If you want to purchase a phone, tablet or other device in store, you have to go to their outdated and clunky point of sale system and have an employee take it from there. This is all about to change.
AT&T recently said that they were going to embrace the iPad and iPhone as point of sale systems in their stores. By the beginning of next year AT&T will have iPhones in their stores that run a stripped down version of OPUS, a type of point of sale software. Customers will be able to buy accessories and have AT&T employees configure basic account settings with this simple version of OPUS. However, once the full version of OPUS is released to AT&T, they will be totally ridding themselves of counters and traditional point of sales systems and switching to iPads full time. We should expect this to happen over the next two years.
