At 23, Elie Y. Katz already had two good places to learn what people wanted: a Chinese takeout shop and a bakery. Then he added a third, the Teaneck Township Council. Some young politicians arrive with a theory of public life. Katz arrived with businesses to run and customers who could presumably locate him without consulting an organizational chart.
He took his council oath in November 1997, after winning an election to fill a vacancy. The young restaurateur owned Chopstix Chinese Take-Out and Royal Bakery. He had a business-management degree from Touro College. Asked about his age, he pointed out that his friends spanned generations. His constituency, he was saying, would be wider than his birth cohort.
“I'm going to be a voice for everyone.”Elie Y. Katz, on joining Teaneck’s council in 1997
Almost three decades later, the combination remains recognizable. Katz is still involved in Teaneck government. He is also founder, president and CEO of National Retail Solutions, the Newark-based IDT subsidiary that supplies checkout technology and related services to independent retailers. The bakery and the council chamber make a useful introduction to that business. Both put him close to people whose problems needed an answer before the next meeting.
A bakery, a takeout shop, a council seat
Teaneck was home well before it was an elected responsibility. Katz describes himself as a lifelong resident. His involvement in town affairs began early: he chaired its Youth Advisory Board in 1991-1992. It is a pleasing detail in a career that could otherwise disappear into a list of executive titles. Before he was being asked to govern, he was helping younger residents have a say.
In July 2006, his fellow council members selected him as mayor by a 6-1 vote. He was 31, the youngest person to hold the office in Teaneck and its first Orthodox Jewish mayor. The reorganization meeting took place after sunset to accommodate Orthodox members. The mechanics of the occasion offered their own small lesson in how a town makes room for the people serving it.
The position came through a council vote, rather than a separate mayoral election. Katz’s term ran from 2006 to 2008. His stated priority on taking office was revenue: finding development that could ease pressure on taxpayers without simply pursuing construction for its own sake. It was an agenda concerned with what a town could afford, and how it might pay for it.
That interest has an obvious counterpart in the life of a merchant. A business owner can have a busy shop and still spend considerable time wondering where the money went. Town budgets and store accounts have different rules, but both punish an enthusiastic indifference to arithmetic. Katz’s work has repeatedly brought him back to revenue, operating costs and the consequences of decisions made on paper.
His later public-service record includes multiple periods as deputy mayor. The current township roster lists him as a council member for a term ending December 31, 2026. He also serves as council liaison to the Youth Advisory Board. The teenager who helped chair that body now sits on the other side of its connection to local government.
The shopkeeper’s side of the screen
Katz founded NRS in 2015. Its intended customer was easy to overlook in a conversation dominated by large retailers: the independent convenience store, bodega, small grocer or liquor store. These businesses needed reliable ways to sell and manage stock. Their owners also needed time to do the work, which is an inconvenient resource to order more of.
The company’s equipment makes its setting clear. There is a merchant touchscreen, a display facing the customer, a scanner, a receipt printer and a cash drawer. Behind those familiar objects sit inventory records, sales information and management tools. The visible transaction may take seconds. Keeping track of what it means for the business is a longer assignment.
NRS expanded into payment processing through NRS Pay, as well as payroll, business funding and services for gas-station convenience stores through NRS Petro. Its advertising screens and retail data services add other uses for the network. The register has become a place where several parts of a small business meet, with all the opportunity and complexity that implies.
Katz’s food-business experience gives that complexity a personal context. His career includes owning and managing bakeries, restaurants and takeout establishments, alongside real estate. He has dealt with businesses that depend on people coming through the door, employees turning up and products being available when someone wants them. A stock-management feature has a very specific audience in that setting.
He has acknowledged the difficulty of fitting more capabilities into something a busy cashier can readily use. Language matters too. In discussing NRS’s design, he has emphasized making the system approachable for retailers whose English may be limited. A feature that takes too long to understand can become another task left waiting behind the counter.
That is where the founder’s earlier life becomes relevant to his present one. Selling a system is one encounter. Making it useful through the following weeks is an ongoing obligation. A shop owner measures the purchase against a working day, and a working day is rarely polite enough to pause for a software demonstration.
A town is also a collection of counters
Katz’s community work extends beyond elected office. In 2008, he and Daniel Meys, senior pastor of Teaneck Assembly of God, established Helping Hands Food Pantry. The partnership brought together a local businessman and a pastor around the practical job of supplying food to neighbors. Its operation relies on volunteers and donations.
The pantry adds another dimension to a career often described through retail technology. Food is something Katz has sold, something his company helps merchants track and something he has helped make available to residents who need assistance. Those activities have different purposes. Their shared object is unusually concrete.
His personal website features another small example of civic work: a photograph promoting free safety belts for residents. Katz holds a bright reflective belt, smiling beside another participant. It is a decidedly less formal image than an executive portrait. The object is practical, the message immediate and the visual subtlety approximately that of a lighthouse.
In his public account of family life, Katz says he and his wife Esther built their family and business in Teaneck. That local continuity matters to the shape of his story. His business career grew outward from a place where he remained involved in public decisions, rather than becoming a reason to lose touch with it.
His writing has continued to concern itself with the small frictions of running a store. In a February 2025 trade article, he discussed payroll mistakes and the damage they can do to employees’ trust. His 2026 Forbes Council topics included staff retention and the difficulty of keeping price information connected across two stores. These are subjects with little ornamental value and considerable practical consequence.
There is a similar emphasis in NRS’s collaboration with distributor executive Marty Glick on short educational videos for convenience-store operators. Announced in September 2024, the series covers running, stocking and arranging stores. For Katz, supporting merchants has included both supplying tools and making operational knowledge easier to obtain.
The questions worth leaving the office for
In August 2026, Katz discussed product simplicity with interviewer Jon Dwoskin. The conversation returned to visiting stores and asking merchants questions in person. It is an unglamorous form of research, dependent on being willing to travel to the place where someone else has the expertise.
The appeal is easy to understand. A store visit puts the product back among its interruptions. What seems clear in an office can be awkward beside a queue. A merchant may describe a problem differently from the people who built the feature meant to solve it. Listening gives the disagreement somewhere useful to go.
The next stage of the business includes connecting those physical shops with delivery platforms. On August 11, 2026, NRS announced a direct integration with Uber Eats for eligible merchants in the United States and Canada. Inventory information feeds into the delivery marketplace, while orders return to NRS’s order-management tools alongside purchases made in the store.
The operational point is straightforward: fewer separate steps for the owner. A delivery order and a counter sale draw on the same shop. Connecting their information is an attempt to keep the business from having to behave like two unrelated operations. The neighborhood storefront gains another route to its customers.
Katz’s ambition is to keep independent retailers equipped to participate as buying habits change. It follows naturally from a career spent around local businesses and local decisions. The baker, the council member and the technology executive have different responsibilities, but each has had to consider what happens when a useful neighborhood institution struggles to keep its doors open.
Return to the young restaurateur taking his oath in 1997. He wanted people to become more involved in their town. Years later, his working method still includes going out to meet people where they are. For a founder building around the counter, that is a sensible place to keep learning.