TIL Hobby Lobby doesn't use barcodes
TIL Hobby Lobby doesn't use barcodes
thehill.com
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Weird place. I think I have shopped there maybe once or twice but don’t even remember this being a thing.
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Hobby Lobby, well-known for being owned by Evangelical Christians, fears barcodes are the “mark of the beast,”
Oh, so they're literally fucking insane.
I went looking for more articles about this and came across a Reddit thread where the top comment was:
I mean, the cynic in me says that any large business that does not do full inventory control is a front for money laundering.
Which would certainly be less insane than what The Hill claims is the true reason. Another comment said:
some xtians I've encountered in the workplace literally see the harder way to do something as more virtuous
Which definitely rings true (think: the kind of person who insists cashiers should stand up for...some reason).
Snopes marks the claim that it's due to the mark of the beast as false, but reading their reasoning, this seems too strong a position to me. More accurate would be to say it's not explicitly supported by evidence. Because the official reasoning that is given also feels really flimsy.
Human beings can't read a bar code.
No shit. Human beings can't read the random string of numbers you use currently, either.
A lot of our product comes from cottage industries in Asia that couldn't mark their goods with bar codes if they tried.
Bullshit. You think other stores in your industry don't get stuff from the same places?
Inventory control by computer is not as accurate as you think.
Ok? Can't be worse than by hand.
Employees take more pride in their work when they know they are in charge, not some faceless machine.
This certainly sounds like the most believable part. Not that it's true: this is exactly that fundie bullshit the Redditor I quoted above was talking about. But it's believable that a fundie store might believe it to be true.
Customer service is better.
Everything I've read suggests the exact opposite.
The time savings at check-out is minimal — and easily squandered.
wtf does "squandered" mean, exactly? Be precise.
Reprogramming the computer for sales would take a huge effort in our case, because we put so many individual items on sale each week.
There's no way POS software require reprogramming to enter in sales.
Twenty million dollars is a lot of money.
Not for a company with estimated annual revenue of $8 billion, it's not.
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front for money laundering
Or worse
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culminated in a 2017 civil forfeiture case United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty Ancient Cuneiform Tablets and Approximately Three Thousand Ancient Clay Bullae.
Now that's quite a long name for a case
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I wonder if it's them expecting some sort of apocalypse level event that wipes out electricity but they think their stores are somehow going to keep on keeping on, so this way they can do inventory and sales by candlelight.
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The "mark of the beast" thing was common among fundies when barcodes were being introduced in the 70s, and spilled over into the 80s and 90s somewhat.
There are three guard bars in the barcode format. Fundies claim these translate to 6-6-6, but that's not how they work. They don't translate to numbers at all, and the pattern doesn't match how numbers are encoded.
None of the other reasons to avoid them hold up. Literally nobody else in retail does this. Mom and pop stores use barcodes because they're cheap and speed up a whole lot of work. Since Hobby Lobby has obvious fundie reasoning in other ways--like fighting against paying for employee health insurance that covers birth control--the "mark of the beast" is what we're left with.
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How can snopes mark that as fake? The reasons the founder listed are all clear BS.
The cost for a single barcode scanner is so low that has a ROI of just weeks if not days. They never had a single customer swap a price label on a $100 item?
And I don't get the "huge effort" on sales. With barcodes in 100 milliseconds you can update the promotional discount rate of an item nationwide, simultaneously in 1000 stores, instead of paying 1000 man hours to send someone to physically update the price labels on everything
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Yeah, obviously. Typing in codes makes you better at typing in codes... My job is to minimize human error on skilled data entry
Scans are like, 100x more reliable, maybe more. I can't count the number of bugs that ended up being human error. In several years of coding, my mistakes costed cents...Theirs costed tens of thousands of dollars
They're avoiding scans because they're dumb, simple as
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Dude, you can make a barcode of anything with literally a Microsoft word font, and you can scan with a phone. They can keep the same item IDs for heaven's sake - I work for a manufacturer, and we wanted to add barcodes literally just for our own internal inventory counting (no on site POSs, less structured warehouse given nature of work). Our internal item codes have letters and symbols in them, like 25WIDGET-01.
I was able to tweak the label printing template to add an additional line of the same item code in barcode font with the right open and close symbols added (/25WIDGET-01/) and then when we do inventory, we use a really cheap app that let me put together a scanning form that lets the user scan the code, converts it back to the string, and then lets them input a quantity, and sends it back to a master excel document without needing to manually transcribe written inputs or risking employee typos or visually misidentifying the item as 26WIDGET-01 instead. We also no longer have to have one group of counters scour the entire disjointed warehouse looking for every single location one of "their" items might be and hope they found all of them while other groups chaotically do the same - your group is assigned to scan EVERYTHING in this section. If you find something without a label you report it. No more crazy margin math, no more "oops I didn't think I'd find boxes of our hottest seller in the storage trailer", no more 30 paper copies of a form.
Our total organizational cost to use this system in 2 countries and half a dozen locations was about 12 man hours of my completely underpaid time and about $30 per location per inventory in app fees on existing company phones.
We made no changes to our ERP. It reduced inventory time, recounts, and mistakes by ~50%. Employees LOVED not having to waste time trying to exactly copy longass random strings for our weirder items or the "gotcha" items. Our vendors don't barcode for us either - we do it on receiving, because we already have to label the items with our internal code anyway.
And we're doing a TON of custom manufacturing - often items that literally may never be sold under that code again - with large volume orders, we're not asking cashiers to manually enter everything for stocked items sold repeatedly at small volume. We're literally ONLY using this for inventory and get no other benefits. Their excuses are such hot bullshit it's crazy.
Barcodes also literally have nothing to do with discounts - as above, they are literally just a way of storing a string visually. Not exaggerating to call them a font meant to be read by computers. If you are storing pricing in a computer anywhere, and not making cashiers enter THAT manually as well, then the only difference between barcodes and not is that with a barcode they scan the item code into the computer and without they manually type it?
And if the only place they store pricing is on the item sticker, that is a system so fucking vulnerable to fraud both internal and external it's CRAZY. For an organization of their size??? No way.
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Short answer: obviously true/false is not the same as provably true/false.
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I will say, doing things the hard way is virtuous. It makes you stronger, it makes you wiser and more flexible.
But that's very different from doing things the stupid way. Putting weights on your arms to do laundry improves you. Doing laundry with vegetable oil instead of detergent is just being an idiot
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Doing things that are hard but necessary is virtuous. Doing things the hard way when there is an easier way is the same as the stupid way.
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I will say, doing things the hard way is virtuous.
This is not true in all cases. If you want to go from New York to Maine, traveling South until you loop around and come to Maine from the north isn't somehow more virtuous.
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They also don't sell Halloween decorations.
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They sure sell Christmas and July 4th decorations though.
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They’ve chosen to leave A LOT of room for human error. Using barcodes would make checkout and inventory quicker and easier, so that “putting employees first” excuse sounds like bullshit. I think they genuinely believe that “mark of the beast” stuff.
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“We have considered scanning at our registers, but do not feel it is right for us at this time,” Hobby Lobby writes on its website.
Very unlikely that the quote was written by a cashier or a person who actually does inventory. So, the person who doesn't "feel it is right" is a person who doesn't have to deal with it. It's like going to a Catholic priest for advice about sex between two consenting adults.
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Fellow LGR viewer!
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lol nailed it! Love his content.
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From the LGR video, huh?
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Yeah just a very interesting tidbit I thought and then I found this article.
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There was a thing in the Satanic Panic where some people thought barcodes were the sign of the Beast because we use them to buy and sell.
Hobby Lobby is super Christian.
Edit: never mind, it's covered in the article.
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And from what I have read elsewhere, the cashiers hate it.
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I never noticed. But, I haven't been to Hobby Lobby in probably ten years. Also, I'm old, and seeing someone enter prices into a cash register wouldn't seem odd to me, I don't think I would have taken notice. Maybe now, since I've been practically recruited as a check-out person, working for Walmart for free, and in the process taking someone's job, maybe now I would, but I never have.
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Please run far, far away from Hobby Lobby. The owners are the absolute worst people. Michaels is infinitely better if you have the choice.
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This reads exactly like boomers talk.
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Meanwhile they require vendors to apply code128 barcodes (so: without the "mark of the beast" 😂 bars) on all the shipping boxes for warehouse management https://docs.hobbylobby.com/pdf/Domestic%20Barcoding%20Instructions%20-%20October%202023.pdf
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Wow, time capsule to the 80s.
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They didn't use security cameras until pretty recently.
I had a friend that worked in one years ago. He kept his smock when he left. He'd go in and fill carts up with art supplies, just push it all out to his car. They would sell furniture in the outer entryway - tables and cabinets and things. A few times we'd back a pickup truck to the front door and just load up some furniture and take it away. Once an employee helped us load it, and thanked us.
Bizarre