At Joe the Art of Coffee’s morning kiosk in Grand Central Terminal, cashiers are testing out a new way to take orders.

Earlier this month, the popular java stand traded its traditional cash register for a sleek new iPad. And customers are taking notice.

“Whenever they realize [that we’re using one] they go, ‘Wow! That’s an iPad. Cool!'” said cashier Amy Hattemer, 27, who wielded an iPad while collecting payments and handing out cups of coffee during the Monday morning rush.

Joe’s has outfitted their Grand Central store’s iPad with an app called “ShopKeep” that lets staffers ring up orders and calculate change, which staffers pull from a change drawer, and also tracks sales in real time. The company is also using the new technology at its Columbia University branch.

“It’s great because it also keeps a backup online with all of our sales,” Hattemer said.

Not far away, at the newly opened Steve’s Craft Ice Cream shop on East 42nd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues, staff have also turned to the popular gizmo in lieu of a cash register.

Steve’s uses a different app, called “Square,” that allows staff to ring up orders using color-coded menu item buttons. The store is planning to transition to ShopKeep as part of a pilot program soon, staffers said.

Steve’s manager Stacey Slate said the iPad has been a hit with customers, who love to ask about it when they see it sitting on the countertop.

“We get just as many questions about [the iPad] as we do about our ice cream,” said Slate, 25. She said the shop plans to buy several additional iPads so that staff can walk around the store helping customers while also ringing them up.

Joe’s customer Mike Addeo, 25, of Murray Hill, said he wasn’t surprised that some stores would move to the iPad — calling the portable technology “neat.”

Mark Secrest, 45, who lives in Gramercy Park, agreed.

“I think Joe is cool so whatever they do is all right with me,” he said as he stopped for his morning caffeine fix in Grand Central Terminal Monday morning.

Check Out the iPad Cash Register in Grand Central Station

Cult of Mac

The good folks at the coffee shop Joe are using an iPad-based cash register at their location in Grand Central Terminal, New York. As seen in this video, it’s compact, fast, and efficient:

Shopkeep.com is the company behind the iPad register, and provides the software and hardware to make your iPad into a cash register. Designed specifically for coffee shops, bakeries, or specialty shops with fewer than 150 items, the iPad POS prints receipts and even pops the cash drawer, but takes up very little space. A simple cash drawer, receipt printer, and stand for the iPad starts at $850, with add ons for credit card scanning and barcode scanning available. They also provide BackOffice, a web-based back end that syncs all the information from the register to the cloud, allowing businesses to easily keep track of daily sales, backup data, and export the information straight into QuickBooks.

Touch screen cash registers are nothing new, but this is the first to integrate a consumer tablet device into the system. Of course, if you don’t need a cash drawer, receipts and back-end monitoring, something simple like Square allows you to accept credit cards and issue email receipts from an iPad or iPhone.

The iPad is not included, and monthly fees for ShopKeep start a $49/mo.

Looks like the cash register is dead. Or soon will be. The iPad is already an essential business tool for some small business’ and a new cash register application should make it even easier for small businesses to take payments via their iPad. The application created by shopkeep.com has been put into service in the Joe coffee shop in Grand Central Terminal in New York. The new point-of-sale app will also print receipts and even makes the mandatory ka-ching when sales are rung up.

It will also transmit sales information to its web-based system so that managers using ShopKeep’s BackOffice software can track sales in real time, manage their inventory, run reports and export the data for use in other applications.