Sweda 76.

I found a listing for this Sweda 76 on Craigslist. It’s currently for sale in the Denver area. It’s never been used and was pulled for its original box for these photos.

I know this model and features from identical registers at Ames Department Stores’ service desks before the chain converted to the IBM 3680 Programmable Store System in the early 1980s. I can’t make out all the buttons in the left hand column, but the top two refer to layaways, and the bottom two (in the “4” and “3” row) are for inventory purposes. The features on this Sweda 76, and similar features on the Sweda 46, were used for inventory tracking purposes. The mechanism on the very left is for a punch tape that was removed and sent to a main office for routine scanning into a mainframe. The two inventory buttons are for “double pass” items. The cashier would enter two sets of numbers when ringing up these “double pass” items, usually in softlines. First pass would be an inventory number and the second pass would be the department or class along with the price. At least that’s the way Ames did it.

I suspect the other two buttons are related to refunds and other service desk functions. At the time, Ames handled layaways at the service desk. It would be later in the chain’s history that it would be moved to the back of the store with its own counter.