Whats a good way to keep track of members that visit our establishment?

October 16, 2009 9:39 AM

Help me come up with an easy way to track members at the entrance to our "private club"

So I'm helping to open a bar, and North Carolina laws require that we be a private members only club because we serve alcohol but no food. That means every customer must be a member, and must sign in before they can enter.

I'd like to speed the process up for them by giving each member a small card (key chain or wallet sized) with a unique barcode on each. That way, they can just scan their membership card when they enter the bar, and we'll be able to be sure they're counted.

I'd also want to use the system as a way to see who are most frequent customers are, and reward them for being regulars. Occasionally, we might run give-away promotions that would involve coming to the bar on a certain night each week, etc.

I've looked at http://www.card-scanner.com/scanshell-pro.html and that looked like a pretty good solution, but then I started thinking about maybe using a cell phone to record the data and plug it into a database.

Does anyone have any ideas of how we could track this information quickly and efficiently?

posted by JakeTimberlake to grab bag (12 answers total)

I would look into QR codes instead of bar codes, which can encode more information and can be recognized on cell phones using readily available software.
posted by onshi at 10:16 AM on October 16, 2009

The back of your drivers license has a barcode. Use that. No one wants another membership card.

You can make sense of this information with a fancy barcode scanner from Metrologic.
posted by mmdei at 11:15 AM on October 16, 2009

(Obviously, you'd also need to find an off-the-shelf or custom application to sort out who's a member.)
posted by mmdei at 11:16 AM on October 16, 2009

The San Francisco Public Library uses key-fob-sized library cards that have barcodes. You could design a cool graphic for your bar on the other side. People might be more likely to add something to their keyrings rather than having another card to carry.
posted by vickyverky at 11:20 AM on October 16, 2009

No one wants another membership card, but then again, a lot of people don't like the idea of letting strangers scan and log (as opposed to view) their government-issued ID cards.
posted by onshi at 11:20 AM on October 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

My understanding of how these barcode scanners work (which may be very very wrong) is that they learn whatever bardcode you tell them to learn... so can't you give people a choice between using their driver's license or getting a dedicated membership card?
posted by brainmouse at 11:34 AM on October 16, 2009

My gym assigns us a 6 digit number. They provide a card, but you don't have to carry it around. People who walk in just say their 6-digit number -- or read it off the card -- and someone keys it into a database to check that they match the photo on file. Easy enough, and you could probably do the whole thing on a smartphone with off-the-shelf database software. Just keep good backups!
posted by rdn at 11:38 AM on October 16, 2009

mmdei writes "The back of your drivers license has a barcode. Use that. No one wants another membership card."

I'm going to guess that a not insignificant number of people frequenting a private club are going to be without driver's licences either voluntarily or at the state's request.

10 digit phone numbers are a good choice for something like this. Most people have one and have it memorized and in case of collisions or the phone less there are huge swaths of nulls that can be handed out. And if a client forgets their card you can key it in manually without a look up. The problem is they aren't a secret so if you have to make sure people aren't using other peoples membership they won't work.

If you do go with phone numbers a simple USB key pad connected to a low end PC could allow people to just enter their number on a screen. It would be a very simple interface to program even in something as mundane as Access. If the key pad gets damaged or stolen they are cheap to replace. And if a single station couldn't keep up with demand it'll scale to several stations with ease. Probably wouldn't hurt to have two stations anyways in case of down time. Probably a bit more money than your linked scanner but you wouldn't have to produce cards and you wouldn't be locked into a vendor.
posted by Mitheral at 12:02 PM on October 16, 2009

Don't think barcode; think proximity card -- more likely to be reliable, given that you don't have to keep 'em clean and no physical contact with the reader device needs to be made.
posted by davejay at 12:43 PM on October 16, 2009

I'm very interested in barcodes or QR codes because they're easy and cheap to laminate and put on the key card myself. I don't want to scan DLs because people won't go for that, and I don't want to make them tell me a number because they may as well just tell us their name.

At the most basic level I'm looking for a smartphone program (or a hardware device) that will scan the code and enter the membership number into a text file. Then I can run an excel formula to go into the text file for the day, and add 'points' to the members accounts who stopped by the night before.

Just to clarify, for those of you who aren't in NC, a 'private club' is just a regular old bar that doesn't serve food. NC requires you to have memberships on file for everyone. Most places just have a door guy that sits in a chair inside the building and checks IDs and has them sign their name on a clipboard. Most just scribble an illegible name. I'm looking to duplicate the ease of that scenario but add in the ability to track who came into the bar each night.
posted by JakeTimberlake at 12:53 PM on October 16, 2009

Thinking about this more, I've changed my mind: the only way to get the "ease of that scenario" while having the ability to (in theory) track the people who came in would be telephone numbers coupled with a first name. Doesn't even have to be a real one, so long as it's the same one every time. People not interested in your points system and whatnot won't be consistent, but you don't care about them anyway, right?
posted by davejay at 2:14 PM on October 16, 2009

The trouble with insisting on a drivers license - not everyone has one! Membership card seems to be the way to go here. If you are super paranoid about identifying who presents the card, make it a photo ID. Cause, if it's just "scan the card and get in", what's stopping your members giving their valid card to anyone? With a photo, your doorman can check it and make sure that the person is who they say they are. Check the photo, scan the card, you're in!
posted by humpy at 3:30 PM on October 16, 2009