SPONSORED FEATURE: Toolstation swapped aging Linux tills across branches for compact ASUS NUCs on ChromeOS Flex, cutting support tickets and freeing counter space
When Toolstation's customers walk into a branch, work has usually paused somewhere else. A plumber, decorator or electrician is there because a plug won't fit, a roller has worn out, or the van needs restocking with brushed-steel double sockets. It is a place where trades and dedicated DIYers go when they need to get on with the job.
Toolstation's point-of-sale terminals therefore need to keep pace with staff answering questions, checking stock and closing the sale before a quick visit turns into a long wait.
"We know that we can provide top-quality, industry-leading customer service, but we need the IT functionality behind that to back us up," says Simon Marshall, store manager at Toolstation's Bridgwater branch.
Founded in 2003, the retailer has grown to more than 550 UK branches stocking over 25,000 products for trade and DIY customers. The newer Toolstation GO format pushes the convenience model further, with smaller high-street locations, digital kiosks and local ranges shaped by store-level insight.
That growth, online and in stores, has strained parts of the technology estate. Some in-store systems still ran on aging Linux-based hardware that had become slow, difficult to patch and awkward to support across a large branch network. At the Bridgwater store, close to head office, manager Simon Marshall says the old terminals were "very slow, very clunky". They had been fine for a smaller business, he says, but "due to our rapid growth, they quickly became unsuitable" for the role.
The legacy PoS running on a custom Linux build was one instance of hardware no longer up to the task. "We had a struggle with our legacy equipment. We were unable to support the operating systems with security patches, which then became an operational inefficiency for our support teams. This then created security concerns, where we were unable to manage our antivirus and any other support around that which again, in turn, created an operational overhead," explains Corron Mlcak, IT end user technology lead, Toolstation.
Toolstation concluded it needed to refresh the entire technology estate, from contact centers, warehouses and distribution hubs to its countrywide network of branches. The first decision was to build on the Google Chrome ecosystem already in use elsewhere in the business. The second was to find hardware that could run that model at the till without reintroducing the size, support and peripheral problems of the old estate.
Retailers keep investing in technology even as store IT teams are asked to support more devices and software with limited local help. Gartner forecasts global enterprise IT spending in the retail market will grow 7.4 percent in 2026 to $233 billion.
That spend reflects a shift in operational priorities: staff need reliable PoS systems with instant access to product and HR data, while head office wants tighter reporting and standardized processes. Security teams, meanwhile, are prioritizing device protection and patching, and finance is keen to avoid the ongoing expense of dispatching IT engineers to update individual branch devices by hand.
Given that online sales still only account for a quarter to one-third of total UK retail spend, according to the ONS, stores remain a focal point for technology investment. A Business Research Insights report estimated that one-fifth of retail tech investment goes into improving in-store technology, while smart PoS accounts for over one-third of retail store tech deployments because integrated payment systems can speed up transactions and improve the customer experience.
ASUS echoes this sentiment. "Retailers are trying to control IT overheads and support costs while modernizing aging infrastructure for newer software requirements," says Chris Davies, ASUS Country Product Manager for the NUC Mini PC Division. "At the same time, they need to strengthen cyber resilience and reduce hardware downtime, because both have a direct effect on costs and customer experience."
The UK 2025/26 Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that 31 percent of retailers and wholesalers had experienced a breach or attack during the previous year. In the most extreme attacks, such as those experienced by M&S and Co-Op, breaches can cost hundreds of millions and significantly impact day-to-day operations such as getting stock into store and serving customers.
"Customer service is at the core of our business model," explains Bridgwater branch manager Simon Marshall. "Customers do like to come in and out as quickly as possible… so having a system that keeps up with the speed of staff is integral to that."
The old Linux systems were capping Toolstation's ambitions. The retailer wanted a counter terminal that could do more than open a cash drawer, process card payments, and print receipts: a device that could run web apps, check stock, pull customer information, support new sales processes and, increasingly, sit inside a managed cloud environment.
