Store name: Claro's Italian Markets
Number of stores: 6 Stores
Specialty: specialty foods
Location: Southern California
Established in 1947
Using CounterPoint since: 1998

A family-owned and -operated grocery store, Claro’s Italian Market opened in 1947 when Italian immigrant Joe Claro traded his house for a small store with living quarters in the back.

Over the years, the market has grown steadily and significantly, and today, the family operates six stores
in Southern California and carries more than 5,000 specialty food items.

The Claros quickly realized that they could no longer keep track of prices on index cards—their practice for years. So, in the 1970s, they had a custom system designed for the store,
which they outgrew after several years. They chose to replace it with Synchronics V6.5, which they upgraded to CounterPoint in 1998.

“We felt so good about Synchronics [now Radiant Systems] and we could tell that the future of CounterPoint was good,” says Rosemarie Lippman, who runs the store with her parents, Frank and Geraldine Claro, and her sister Mary Linda Dadonna. “We really see where the influence from CounterPoint comes out in our work.”

“CounterPoint is so flexible,” Lippman continues. “And we fell in love with SIQ Report Writer because of the flexibility of the reports that we can basically tailor to fit our needs.”

The family uses CounterPoint in an unusual way, choosing to forgo a point-of-sale workstation in order to sustain the image Joe Claro established in 1947. “We want to maintain the
old mama-papa corner-store image,” says Dadonna. “CounterPoint does its job in the background—very quietly, conveniently, and efficiently.”

The Claros make extensive use of CounterPoint’s barcoding function. Says Lippman, “The idea of having eight different barcodes is tremendous. In a business like ours, if you’ve got a box of candy from Norway, you might have normal and European barcodes on the outside of the box and on each chocolate bar. So you use up the barcode fields. Additionally, we set up one of the fields to use our own number.”

"What’s so nice about CounterPoint is that you don’t have to tweak it so much to make it work for you.”