TIL Hobby Lobby doesn't use barcodes

I do find it very funny when I read an article about them spending a ton of money on a fake. If I remember correctly, some of them have been blatant fakes too.

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

Short answer: obviously true/false is not the same as provably true/false.

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.

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

I disagree. The three separators are exactly the same as the number six. I agree they are not used as the number six though. I don't buy into the mark of the beast crap but I found it to be a very interesting coincidence (cannot buy or sell unless you accept the mark of the beast (paraphrasing)).

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.

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.