There’s no shortage of misinformation on the internet, and from time to time, you hear something that just sounds too odd to be true. That has been the reaction of many people when watching recent videos on social media that purport to show a Hobby Lobby shopping hack: Not all (identical) items have the same price.

“Ok, so I’ve seen the TikTok where the same items have different prices in Hobby Lobby… I thought it wasn’t true, but I had to return some things, so I wanted to check for myself,” a video by a user called bowhuntress begins. She then went to check the price tags on identical items, and sure enough, she found many instances of price discrepancies. A sign could be $39.99 or $49.99, depending on which one you happen to grab. “Check those prices before you buy the most expensive one,” she says.

This isn’t the only video like this, and cashiers who work at Hobby Lobby have confirmed – there really are price discrepancies in the store.
The natural next question is this: Since Hobby Lobby is a well-run, national chain that has been operating for over five decades, how could something like this happen?

And why?

Barcodes and the Beast

In the 70s and 80s, when widespread adoption of barcode technology was first happening, a rather silly theory spread around Christian circles that the barcode was the mark of the beast spoken of in Revelation 13. Never mind that the barcodes don’t typically say “666,” the passage from the Bible says that the number 666 is the “number of a man” (and not the mark of the beast), and no one gets a barcode tattooed on their forehead or hand… there was a little bit of hysteria for a while. Even today, this idea comes up from time to time, and a rumor has spread for years that this is the reason why Hobby Lobby doesn’t use barcodes.

Spoiler alert – that’s not the reason.

It is well known that Hobby Lobby Founder David Green is a conservative Christian, and because of that, Hobby Lobby’s conspicuous lack of barcodes seemed to fit the narrative, but, aside from a Snopes article debunking this rumor, David Green has actually written about why he doesn’t use barcodes in his stores. This is his list of reasons, printed in his 2005 book More than a Hobby:

1. Human beings can’t read a bar code.
2. A lot of our products come from cottage industries in Asia that couldn’t mark their goods with bar codes if they tried.
3. Inventory control by computer isn’t as accurate as you think.
4. Employees take more pride in their work when they know they are in charge, not some faceless machine.
5. Customer service is better.
6. The time savings at check-out is minimal – and easily squandered.
7. Reprogramming the computer for sales would take a huge effort in our case because we put so many individual items on sale each week.
8. Twenty million dollars is a lot of money.

With improvements in POS technology, many of those reasons may no longer be relevant. For example, putting an item on sale may not be quite as difficult as he makes it sound for many retailers. But the truth of the matter is barcodes can be confusing, and they have limitations. Hobby Lobby handles approximately 80,000 SKUs, which is more than a grocery store but just a little more than half of what a typical Walmart handles.

Nevertheless, David Green seems to have business-related reasons for choosing not to use barcodes – not theological reasons.

$7.99 at Hobby Lobby… Or Possibly $14.99

So why the price discrepancies? Apparently, due to their unique approach to POS, items are priced based on what shipment they come in on. As inflation occurs, or some other externality, and they have to raise their prices, they only raise prices on the new shipments – even if that shipment contains identical items to lower-priced products already in stores.

Cashiers have to enter every product code by hand at Hobby Lobby (the long waits at check-out are starting to make sense…), and they have to memorize all of the sales items so they know how to discount them manually. Keep an eye on your tally, in other words, and search through the bin for the lowest-priced item if you’re trying to save a few bucks. And, apparently, cashiers will usually honor the lowest-priced item if you are buying more than one of anything that happens to have inconsistent pricing.

This shopping hack turns out to be true.

So Why Does Everyone Else Use Barcodes?

Barcodes really do save a tremendous amount of time, and while they don’t solve all of a business’s inventory woes, there aren’t a lot of great reasons not to use them unless you count the fact that QR codes are starting to replace barcodes.

QR codes are rapidly gaining popularity due to their ability to store larger amounts of information, their ability to be scanned when damaged up to 30%, their ability to be scanned by anyone with a smartphone, and the fact that they are much easier to edit/change.

So maybe Hobby Lobby was just holding out for better technology all this time. But you still better check the prices.

Quick Hits

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• CNBC reports on what industry experts say retail will look like in 5 years from now.
• Open AI again stuns the tech world by unveiling Sora, its text-to-video application, capable of creating stunning, nuanced visuals with only simple, text descriptions as its input.
• The Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archeology lists the top 10 biblical archeology discoveries of 2023.
• U.S. credit card debt now tops $1 trillion – but are we really surprised?