What do Lowe's, Home Depot, PacSun, and Nordstrom all have in common? All these major retailers are starting to deploy iPads in place of cash registers. The firms are finding that putting iPads in the hands of customer sales reps roaming the floors of the store increases both the average size of a sale and increases the number of sales processed per day per employee. The increase in worker productivity is so substantial that the cost of making the change to iPads pays for itself very quickly.
Expect to see even relatively small retailers begin to use tablets in place of cash registers, and as this kind of automation becomes more common, highly reliable, affordable business class broadband will become even more important than it is today.