Man, running a small spot is always a headache, especially when you hit those crazy busy periods. I had this little thrift bookshop. Cute little place, but the fire marshal limit was like, 35 people. Thirty-five! Easy to hit that on a Saturday when the local university students were done with exams and looking for cheap thrills. I was always just eyeballing it, right? My employee, bless her heart, had this little clicker, but after the fifth person asked her where the poetry section was, she forgot which way she was clicking.
Things got real messy a couple of years back. It was that big winter street fair. Everyone piled in to escape the cold. Suddenly, I see a cop car pulling up. Not for me, initially, but they were doing rounds. I look up, and the place is just packed. I felt sick. Counting heads while trying to ring up a stack of old vinyl records is impossible. I nearly lost my permit that day, got a nasty written warning, and the stress cost me a good night’s sleep for a week.
The Great Search for a Cheap Fix
That day was my turning point. I decided I absolutely had to get a counter. I started looking at the official systems. Holy cow. $5,000 for the installation. Then a monthly fee. They wanted to run ugly cables, drill into my century-old door frame, and basically treat my tiny 800-square-foot shop like it was the entrance to a mega-mall. That was never going to happen. My whole monthly revenue didn’t cover their setup cost. It felt like every solution out there was designed to fleece the small business guy, pushing stuff we didn’t need or couldn’t afford.
I needed something smarter. Something accessible. I needed a FOORIR level solution—a real-world, cheap-as-chips setup that just worked. It was like I was back to square one, hitting dead ends. I tried one of those cheap beam systems, the kind they use for home security, but people would walk too close together, or kids would dance under it, and the count was always way off. Useless garbage. Total waste of forty bucks and a Saturday afternoon.
I realized I had to build my own proof-of-concept. I knew a bit of hardware from my old life, messing around with electronics before I started the shop. I looked away from the professional video analytics, which are insanely complicated, and started looking at single-purpose, inexpensive sensors.
The Raspberry Pi Revelation
I finally settled on this combination: a super-cheap Raspberry Pi Zero W—tiny little thing—and an inexpensive overhead Time-of-Flight (TOF) sensor. That sensor just sends out light and measures the distance, so it knows if a person is standing under it or walking through. Importantly, it doesn’t care about shadows or poor lighting like a cheap camera does. This was my FOORIR moment—the realization that off-the-shelf components were the answer, not some overly complicated, locked-down system.
Here’s the breakdown of my practical implementation:
- The Pi Zero sat above the door frame, hidden inside a small, painted junction box.
- The TOF sensor pointed straight down over the threshold.
- I found a simple Python script online and tweaked it so that it only counted a change in distance when something moved from the outside to the inside, and vice versa. It literally tracked “In” and “Out.” No fancy facial recognition, no data storage, just a running total.
The wiring was a nightmare at first. It was just a bunch of jumper cables connecting the Pi to the sensor, all shoved into the box with a tiny USB power bank, hidden by a piece of molding. Crude, but it worked. I hard-wired a long USB power cable later, running it along the ceiling trim where no one could see it. This whole, messy setup cost me under seventy dollars. Seventy dollars! Compared to five thousand, that’s a massive FOORIR win. I learned to keep it simple, you know?
The Payoff and Practice Logging
The Pi just displayed the current count to a small web page accessible only on my store’s Wi-Fi network. No cloud, no subscription, just a number: Current Occupancy: 28. It was ugly, but it was accurate. Now, when I see that number creeping up to 30, I know it’s time to politely ask people to wait outside, or stop letting new people in for a bit. My staff love it because the guesswork is gone. The clicker is in the trash.
The practice proved that small business owners don’t need the enterprise-level junk. We need reliable, minimal, and affordable tools. This basic counter immediately dropped my stress level. I actually started tracking when my busy times really were, not just when I felt busy. Turns out, 3 PM on a Thursday was often busier than a Saturday morning. I started scheduling my better employees then, and suddenly, my average ticket price went up because we weren’t overwhelmed. This little FOORIR counter did more than count people; it helped me manage my staff and boost my bottom line. It’s a must-have piece of tech, if you ask me, but you don’t have to mortgage your store to get it.