Why Hobby Lobby Doesn’t Use Barcodes, Straight From the Founder of the Store

When it comes to retail stores, Hobby Lobby is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable to walk through and shop in, especially if you’re 30-plus and more into home decor and DIY projects than going out at night with friends. But there’s one thing the arts-and-crafts chain does that really gets under people’s skin, especially when the store is busy, and the lines are long — they don’t use barcodes.

No barcodes means no scanning items into the computer and sliding them across the counter straight into your bag. Instead, each price has to be manually typed in by the cashier. Since this can slow things down for both employees and customers, it begs the question: in this age of technology, why doesn’t Hobby Lobby use barcodes?

The answer is actually pretty sensible.

Hobby Lobby doesn’t use barcodes because, according to the company, the system “does not feel it is right for us at this time,” as noted on its website. The store’s founder, David Green, also addressed the matter years ago, explaining exactly why the company avoids barcodes, a reason that’s still relevant today, as cashiers clearly still type prices manually.

In his 2005 book More Than a Hobby: How a $600 Start Up Became America's Home & Craft Superstore, Green listed several reasons why barcode and scanning systems didn’t (and still don’t) work for Hobby Lobby, including the fact that “human beings can’t read a bar code.”

He explained that barcodes don’t show the price and can actually create confusion for both the customer and the cashier. That’s why each item simply has its price printed on it. Green added, “If one customer picks up an item and then puts it down in the wrong bin, the next customer can be misled as to the real price — which leads to a dispute at the cash register.”

Another factor is that many of the products Hobby Lobby sells come from cottage industries in Asia that “can’t label their goods with barcodes even if they wanted to.”

Green noted that asking a supplier to barcode an order of, say, 60 boxes of paper mache would “kill the deal right there.”

He also pointed out that barcodes can get smudged, which interferes with speed just as much as manually entering prices. If a barcode is unreadable, someone still has to find the item and figure out the cost, which basically defeats the purpose of a scan-and-go system.

So, if you were one of the people misled into thinking Hobby Lobby doesn’t use barcodes because it’s some kind of “mark of the beast,” hopefully this clears things up.

Green explained that without barcodes, employees can’t track stock through a computer. That doesn’t mean the company doesn’t use computers at all; they use them to handle profit and loss statements and track how much of each item moves in and out of the stores.

Without barcodes, though, Green says employees “have to go to the aisle and actually look at the merchandise, taking note of what’s below minimum level. This has a way of making our people keep their departments straightened up,” he wrote in his book.

Simply put, a no-barcode system helps avoid confusion and keeps employees active on the floor, rather than relying on computers to assess stock and reorder when necessary.

Does it seem a little outdated? Sure. But clearly, it hasn’t stopped people from shopping there.