Spinx to Roll Out Tote POS Platform Across All Stores

Spinx is preparing to replace point-of-sale and foodservice technology across its entire convenience store chain after reopening a vendor evaluation process it had already completed. The South Carolina–based retailer plans to deploy Tote AI’s point-of-sale platform across all 96 of its convenience stores in the Carolinas, with the rollout beginning in the second half of 2026 and concluding by spring 2027, according to an announcement released this week.

The decision is notable for how it was made rather than for the selection of any single technology. Spinx had previously chosen another provider before reassessing its requirements and reversing course, according to C-Store Dive. That reevaluation changed the company’s assessment of what a POS system needed to support, particularly around foodservice operations.

“The platform was compelling enough that we reopened our evaluation,” Luis Ackerman, vice president of technology at Spinx, said in an interview.

Why Spinx Reopened Its POS Decision

Like many convenience retailers, Spinx had been operating with separate systems handling transactions, ordering, and kitchen workflows. Traditional POS upgrades often focus on payments and checkout, while foodservice systems are managed separately. As prepared food becomes more operationally complex inside convenience stores, those divisions can limit flexibility and complicate execution.

During its initial vendor selection, Spinx focused on replacing its existing systems. The reevaluation was triggered once the company assessed whether a single platform could support both checkout and foodservice workflows. That shift expanded the scope of the decision beyond transaction processing alone.

“When we discovered it could also handle our food service technology needs, the decision became clear,” Ackerman said.

Tote’s platform is designed to bring ordering, checkout, and kitchen technology onto one system rather than managing foodservice as a separate layer. For Spinx, this meant evaluating a platform that could support transaction workflows and prepared food operations within the same environment.

The reevaluation was focused around these revised requirements, particularly related to foodservice capabilities, rather than dissatisfaction with the initial choice.

Executing a Chainwide POS Replacement

Spinx plans to deploy the new system across all locations on a defined timeline. The rollout will begin in the second half of 2026, with all stores expected to receive the update by spring 2027, Ackerman said.

The company said the implementation will run on existing hardware, avoiding a full rip-and-replace of store infrastructure. That constraint factored into the deployment plan, reducing operational disruption during the transition.

The POS rollout follows earlier work by Spinx to consolidate its data infrastructure. In a separate initiative, the company partnered with Microsoft and a systems integrator to unify data from multiple operational systems using Microsoft Fabric. According to Microsoft’s customer case study, the effort reduced manual reporting and created a single data foundation capable of supporting advanced analytics, including the ability to build machine learning models.

While the data modernization effort was not positioned as part of the POS decision, it provided context for why fragmentation had become a constraint. Running disconnected systems limited visibility across operations and slowed updates. Consolidation at the transaction layer mirrors earlier consolidation at the data layer.

For Tote, the Spinx is confirmation of the use case for AI in convenience retail technology. “This partnership validates what we’ve been hearing from operators across the country: the convenience store industry is ready for a quantum leap in technology,” Shyam Rao, founder and CEO of Tote, said in a statement.

Spinx has focused on system scope, foodservice support, and execution at scale. Rather than treating POS modernization as a discrete upgrade, Spinx selected a platform intended to replace multiple systems at once. The result is a full-chain deployment with a defined timeline, driven by revised requirements rather than experimentation.