The evolution of people counters
People counters have been used for centuries to track the number of people entering and exiting a building or area. The earliest known use of a people counter was in the late 1700s, when a French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson created a mechanical counter that could count up to 999 people. The device was used in the Louvre museum in Paris to keep track of the number of visitors.
In the late 1800s, mechanical people counters were used in stores and factories to track the number of customers and workers. In the early 1900s, people counters were used in theaters to track ticket sales.
In the early 1900s, the first electronic people counters were developed and used in stores to track customer traffic. These counters used infrared beams to detect people passing through a doorway. Since then, people counters have become increasingly sophisticated, with the development of infrared, thermal, and video-based counters. Today, people counters are used in a variety of settings, including retail stores, airports, museums, and public transportation to help businesses better understand customer behavior and optimize operations.
StoreTech is hardware agnostic, which allows us to try and test the best people counters on the market and recommend the right type of people counter for your environment. We can even make use of people counters you may already have, for a cost-effective upgrade to your current system linked to our powerful performance management cloud portal.
People counters have evolved over the decades like most electronics. Becoming more accurate, robust and reliable. Likewise the cost has also come down as the technologies become more widespread.
The earliest people counters were the manual clickers. Still used today in some instances. This requires someone standing close by to literally count everyone that passes by. As you can imagine, this is quite labour intensive, requiring the person with the clicker to not get distracted. Accuracy will vary greatly as human error will play a big part.
StoreTech started in 1998 and was one of the first companies to count people in retail environments using break-beam technology before moving to more sophisticated infrared and thermal sensors. We understood the benefit of knowing how many people were entering your store could provide invaluable insight and allow the store to objectively measure and optimise performance.
